Paterson Joseph as Brutus addresses the crowds after the assassination

Feel the heat. The RSC has just set Julius Caesar thrillingly ablaze. Shakespeare’s Roman play is often, wrongly, considered cold and colourless. Now, though, this political drama is scorchingly reinvigorated in Gregory Doran’s staging which – with a superb ensemble of black British actors – translates Ancient Rome to modern-day Africa. It’s a startlingly close fit.

The air pulses with festive drumming as the populace parties under a baking sun, celebrating Caesar’s latest victory alongside a traditional shaman, who’ll soon double as the herald of doom.

In a safari suit with dyed hair and a gold watch, Jeffery Kissoon’s Caesar is a post-colonial general stiffening into an aged dictator with a paranoid streak. The African setting endows the opposition with an immediately comprehensible fervour too when Paterson Joseph’s Brutus – sweat-beaded and impassioned – addresses the masses after the autocrat’s assassination, crying, “Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?”

Doran picks up on tiny textual details and plumbs their significance. Here a fleeting reference to shared schooldays feeds into Brutus’s confederacy with Cyril Nri’s Cassius. You can still see the little boys in these men too, which becomes heartbreaking. Nri’s insecure Cassius panics, letting Brutus precipitately assume leadership of the revolutionary gang. Then catapulted into a ruinous war, their tragicomic squabbling – over financial corruption – is almost tearfully hysterical. When they call each other “brother” for the last time, on the battlefield, the term suggests not just macho comradeship but tenderness too.

The verse-speaking is vibrant, the characters complex. Adjoa Andoh is sultry and feisty as Brutus’s wife, not merely virtuous. Ray Fearon plays Mark Antony, Caesar’s golden boy, as a handsome football star entering the political arena, a party animal cannier than Brutus supposes. Running into the blood-soaked murder scene, he is palpably frightened but also diplomatically slippery, suppressing his outrage at first, then breathing fire in his rabble-rousing funeral oration.

Only the production’s ghostly apparitions are disappointing. Overall, though, a resounding triumph for the RSC’s artistic director-designate and an outstanding contribution to the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. Julius Caesar transfers to the West End of London in August and then tours the UK, so track it down.

You might, however, want to steer clear of The Bacchae, a feeble start to the supposedly Dionysian Festival of Chaos in Northampton. Laurie Sansom (artistic director of the town’s Theatre Royal) leads his audience off the beaten track for this site-specific production. An industrial warehouse becomes the setting for Euripides’ darkly twisted tragedy, where the seductive god of wine and madness, Dionysus, ensnares then destroys King Pentheus, who has tried to repress his wild cult.

Granted, the climax is shocking as Kathryn Pogson’s Agave – in a crazed ecstasy – munches on her son’s brains. There’s an intense, barbed moment earlier too, when Ery Nzaramba’s Dionysus strips Liam Bergin’s Pentheus of his city suit. However, Sansom’s concepts are scrambled and his pop-goth, chorusing Bacchantes are naff. That’s not to mention the lift musak, piped in by way of a prologue and epilogue.

Lastly, artistic director Josie Rourke’s first season at the Donmar has become daringly varied. Now comes a rare revival of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, a satire-going-on-ethical debate about scientific progress and moral responsibility. Yet despite scintillating performances, there’s something sterile about this darkening comedy. A trio of mad (or maybe pretend-mad) scientists are holed up in a sanatorium, dressed as Einstein, Newton and Möbius. On top of these delusions, they keep murdering their nurses, whom they claim to love. Dr Von Zahnd (Sophie Thompson in near panto mode) is the hunched spinster who runs this madhouse, assuring an irked detective (John Ramm) that she knows who’s dangerous and who’s not.

The play would surely have felt more urgent in 1961, when nuclear arms were proliferating. But now Dürrenmatt’s scenario seems a puzzling allegory, like a theorem in cryptic algebra. The central performances go some way to make up for this, Justin Salinger’s Newton sneaking around in a camp periwig, and John Heffernan making the conscience-racked Möbius – slipping between madness and clear-eyed despair – nearly as fascinating as Hamlet. Roll on his Prince of Denmark.

‘Julius Caesar’: (0844 800 1110) Stratford to 7 Jul; touring to 27 Oct. ‘The Bacchae’: (01604-624811) to 30 Jun. ‘The Physicists’: (0844 871 7624) to 21 Jul.

Source: The Independent

By Nathan James

Pride Weekend In New York City has become a signature event in the LGBT community, a celebration of the beginning of the gay-rights movement which continues to this day.  The celebrations, ceremonies and parties are legendary, and this biggest of all Pride Month happenings is also the setting for Patrik Ian Polk’s (Noah’s Arc, Punks, Noah’s Arc: Jumping The Broom) latest film, The Skinny.  This independent release tells the story of five friends, a year out of Brown University, who reunite in the city for Pride.

The whirlwind escapades of the group take us from the lighthearted to the deadly serious, with reality bites about such issues as date rape, HIV prevention, and how “bottoms” prep for sex with their lovers (!).  The friends, centered around Magnus (Jussie Smollett) discover truths about each other that are at turns both devastating and hilarious, as when lesbian Langston (played with a delightful British accent by Shanika Warren-Markland), smitten with Jennia Frederiques’s Samantha, a fetching, sassy bartender, can’t muster the courage to ask her out.

Nepohyte lover Sebastian (Blake Young-Fountain) has a crush on the slippery Kyle (Anthony Burrell), and soon discovers that his unrequited crush is not all he imagines him to be.  Rounding out the group of friends is the laconic Joey, played by Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, whose back-and-forth running commentary with Langston is hilarious.

As the weekend progresses, the admittedly ‘in-house’ film–mainstream audiences may find their ears burning at some of the more candid and graphic depictions of our gay life–brings the audience into the sobering issues that lurk beneath the floats and rainbow flags of NYC Pride.  Shot entirely on location in the Big Apple, the film delves into the dangers of drug abuse, HIV exposure, and trust issues when one partner in a would-be relationship is extremely promiscuous.

Polk, who wrote, directed, produces, edited, and performed most of the soundtrack, places his characters in moments both trying and endearing, as when Magnus helps Sebastian recover from a devastating experience of being raped after getting drugged at a club.  Says Polk, “I tried to tell a challenging story about us.”

As the interweaving subplots take us through actual Pride events (the film was shot during Harlem Pride and the Heritage Of Pride March, something Polk says he planned from the first), we learn about new treatments for early HIV exposure (PreP), as Noah’s Arc star Darryl Stephens makes a cameo as Nurse Nicholson (according to Polk, Noah has NOT moved to NYC and taken up nursing), and Wilson Cruz as the doctor educates Sebastian (and us) on this new procedure.  Finding Me star Derrick L. Briggs plays against type as a bad guy, and familiar faces from the NYC LGBT community are sprinkled liberally throughout the movie.

All in all, The Skinny is a fine Pride Month romp, with a few minor missteps, as when Kyle fesses up to his friends about his slip-up with Sebastian at the club–we never do get to see how the group responds to it–but the overall impact of a film about LGBT’s of color,  made by LGBT people of color, transcends this.  The fiim opens today in NYC at the Faison Firehouse Theater, 6 Hancock Place in Harlem (off 124th street between St. Nicholas and Morningside), and at the Quad on W. 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.  Visit www.skinnythemovie.com for showtimes and dates.