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Genre:

Theatre

Release Date:

Mar 2019

Number of discs:

1

Subtitles:

English

Aspect ratio:

16:9

Display:

NTSC

Catalog Number:

OA1224D

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (Donmar Warehouse)

Jane Anouka (Mark Antony); Sheila Atim (Lucius); Jackie Clune (Julius Caesar); Shiloh Coke (Cinna the Poet); Karen Dunbar (Casca); Clare Dunne (Portia, Octavius Caesar); Leah Harvey (Soothsayer); Zainab Hasan (Calpurnia, Metellus Cimber); Jennifer Joseph (Trebonius); Martina Laird (Cassius); Carolina Valdés (Dog, Cinna); Harriet Walter (Brutus);

Power, betrayal, justice. Phyllida Lloyd directs a cast including Dame Harriet Walter in Shakespeare’s great political drama. Part of the Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Shakespeare Trilogy.

Set in the present day in the world of a women’s prison, Julius Caesar could not be more timely as it depicts the catastrophic consequences of a political leader’s extension of his powers beyond the remit of the constitution. As Brutus (Harriet Walter) wrestles with his moral conscience over the assassination of Julius Caesar (Jackie Clune), Mark Antony (Jade Anouka) manipulates the crowd through his subtle and incendiary rhetoric to frenzied mob violence. There follows the descent of the country into factions and the outbreak of civil war.

The Donmar Shakespeare trilogy began in 2012 with this diverse, all-female Julius Caesar which asks the question “Who owns Shakespeare?” Julius Caesar was followed by Henry IV (2014) and The Tempest (2016), each production enthralling audiences in London and New York, and was shared with women and girls in prisons and school across the UK. All three parts of this new Trilogy will be released by Opus Arte throughout 2019, offering screen audiences unique access to these ground-breaking productions.


Reviews

"It's not just the casting that makes it feel daring; there's also a crazed, percussive intensity, and the production abounds with weirdness, thuggery and horror. This is visceral and exciting theatre." (The Evening Standard)

"[Lloyd's production] allows for potent doubleness is, say, Harriet Walter's wonderfully searching performance. You feel that she is both a haunted, hollow-cheeked, proto-Hamlet-like Brutus, racked by the contradictions of his political position and an anguished, thoughtful inmate who, after a taste of imaginative freedom, understands the full philosophical bitterness of the return to incarceration." (The Independent)

"[Phyllida Lloyd's] 'Julius Caeser' is one of the most important theatrical events of the year ... It hits the stage with real urgency." (The Guardian)

Extra features

An All Female Trilogy; Power and Politics; Performing Gender; Brutus & Caesar; Staging Violence; Insights on 'He doth bestride the Narrow World', 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen'; A Director's Process, with Phyllida Lloyd; Trailer; Introduction to the Play; The Plot