Jules César ・ Comédie-Française

In « Julius Caesar », originally staged in 1599 at a decisive moment in the history of England, when Elizabeth I reigned with expanded powers, Shakespeare recounts the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, in the wake of his conquest of Gaul. The bard condenses the lead-up and consequences of this coup into a single day: the senators’ plot, which Brutus joins in the name of the Roman Republic, believing it to be in danger, Caesar’s murder, the speeches of both sides in an atmosphere of insurrection, and the suicides of Brutus and Cassius that leave Mark Antony and Octavius’ armies victorious.

The action takes place in “real-time”, notes Rodolphe Dana, who, for his first collaboration with the Troupe, chose this Roman tragedy never previously staged at the Comédie-Française. The artistic director of the Théâtre de Lorient and co-founder of the actors’ collective Les Possédés, he is renowned for his ability to make texts resonate with our world. He emphasises immediacy in the acting, driven always by the idea of “prospecting, digging, questioning [...] that which makes the fabric of human relations enveloping our lives so complex and so rich”. He takes up the challenge here of adapting this forty-character play for a cast of ten actors, five women and five men. Focusing on the beauty of Shakespeare’s language, wielded here as a tool of political discourse, he dedicates his theatre of emotion to this “tragedy of consciences”. Brutus’ qualms regarding the legitimacy of his betrayal are contrasted against with Marc-Antony’s brilliant rhetoric, raising questions of common good and responsibility, the manipulation of words and, already, of images.

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