ARTicles vol. 6 i.3a: Memories of the Future

Gideon Lester: How are you approaching Julius Caesar?

Arthur Nauzyciel: Whenever I direct a play, the context in which it’s produced is very important. Why are we doing the play here, now, for this audience? Julius Caesar is almost never produced in my own country, France, so when you asked me to read it, I was coming to it for the first time. Of course I immediately saw connections between the play and the fact that this is an election year in the United States. I don’t want that to be obvious in the production, but it provides a strong context. The play also resonates with the political history of Boston – the Kennedys, for example. For me, classical plays are a memory of the future. They’re time capsules – they come from long ago, but they’re with us now and they’ll be here for centuries. They contain a collective memory of human behavior – aspirations, expectations, illusions. As time capsules, it’s interesting to catch them and open them. They are like holograms or like stars, whose light arrives long after their death.

GL: What about the play feels contemporary to you?

AN: There’s something “contemporary” about Julius Caesar, which sounds ridiculous, because it was written in the sixteenth century; it cannot literally be speaking about our own age. In a sense the play is a user’s manual for the next generation, written by Shakespeare for the future, a guide to politics and humanity. It’s not that Shakespeare’s observations are still accurate; it’s more than that. It’s as if nothing has happened in politics since the story that he writes about took place. It’s as if we’re stuck, like a scratched record; we’re still in the final scenes when Octavius arrives. Nothing has evolved in terms of democracy or politics. Like Cassius and Brutus, we believe that democracy is the best system, but it’s still a compromise. So many so-called democracies are still really empires, like Rome in the play. What has changed is our experience of tragedy. We come from a century that invented Auschwitz and Hiroshima, after which we can never stage tragedy the same way again.

GL: You mentioned the Kennedys, and your production will include many references from the 1960s. Can you explain why?

AN: The production isn’t set in the 60s – I believe that all theatre takes place here and now, so it’s not really a question of being in the past, whether that’s Caesar’s Rome or Shakespeare’s London or 1960s America. But we will be highlighting images from the 60s, for many reasons. There’s the obvious link between the assassinations of Kennedy and Caesar, but more than that, I’m intrigued by the way the 60s represent both past and future for us. It was a time of great invention and innovation, obsessed with the future. The best Sci-Fi movies were made in the 60s. And the aesthetic is still inspiring; if you look at furniture or clothes from the 60s, they could belong in today’s design magazines. Julius Caesar is a play about the invention of the future, a dream of a new world, so the resonances are strong.

GL: What else interests you about the 60s?

AN: It was also a period in which the image triumphed over the word. There’s a beautiful story about the debate between Nixon and Kennedy. I don’t know if it’s true, but apparently people who listened to it on the radio voted for Nixon, and people who watched it on television voted for Kennedy. JFK was the first president whose image was more important than the content of his words. Suddenly visual icons and illusions were more powerful than speech. Julius Caesar is so much a play about language and rhetoric, and I think it’ll be interesting to create this double layer by using elements from a time in which language and rhetoric failed. And at the same time,there was a revolution in American art history, with the advent of Pop Art, installations, and performance art. The art and photography of that period was a strong influence in the design for our Julius Caesar, particularly Andy Warhol’s repeated images and the installations of the Ant Farm. All this seemed appropriate for a production at the Loeb Drama Center, with its 1960s architecture. I like it when the theatrical design and the architecture of the building come together and the distinctions between the two spaces are blurred.

GL: The set design incorporates huge repeated photographs of the auditorium. Can you explain why?

AN: In part we wanted to remind the audience that the theatre in which they’re sitting is essentially the same shape as the theatres of ancient Greece and Rome. If you stand on stage and look out at the seats, you see that the configuration is exactly the same, two thousand years later. It’s also good to remember with this play that theatre and democracy were invented at the same time, and that the theatre was, in its origins, a political space as much as a place of entertainment. In this election year, the images of those theatre seats may remind us of public assemblies, or the Senate. And I also want to create an uncertainty for the audience: Are we onstage or offstage? Who are the watchers and who the actors? Are we part of the performance? What is illusion and what is reality? On which sides are the dead and the living?

GL: How do those questions of illusion and reality relate to Julius Caesar?

AN: The play is full of dreams and supernatural events, of ghosts and burning men and lions roaming the streets of Rome. The world that it describes doesn’t literally exist — it’s an imaginary dreamscape, a distortion of reality, and we can’t stage it realistically. The production has to feel truthful but not realistic. I hope that the audience will feel connected to an invisible world, seeing things they can’t usually see, listening to things they can’t hear.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Acting Artistic Director.

Articles issue as 6_3