RSC's new production of Shakespeare's political thriller Julius Caesar heads to Yorkshire

Then last year the people in charge of the RSC asked, what if the doors were thrown open? Would they find a new, undiscovered talent? Well, it’s the RSC, so they weren’t going to select someone straight out of drama school, but what they did end up with is someone who might not necessarily have been on the radar to direct on the main stage at this stage in his career.

And what we have all ended up with in Atri Banerjee, a director who came to the RSC via OpenHire, is his version of Julius Caesar, a bold new take on one of Shakespeare’s most enduring political thrillers. “I come from Oxford, so the RSC was somewhere I used to visit as a teenager as it’s only an hour away. I saw productions like Rupert Goold’s The Merchant of Venice and Maria Aberg’s As You Like It,” says Banerjee. “Some of my career highlights to date include Hobson’s Choice, my first big show at the Royal Exchange, which was a South Asian version of Brighouse’s play; Harm at the Bush Theatre, which had Kelly Gough in it, who is playing Cassius in Julius Caesar; and more recently, Kes at the Bolton Octagon. Julius Caesar is my first professional Shakespeare but it feels like a homecoming.”

Banerjee first started directing while at school, writing a version of Macbeth with two friends. The fact that the version Banerjee came up with was called Big Mac and set in 1950s Hollywood was a good indication that when he got his hands on a professional Shakespeare production, he wasn’t going to treat the Bard with lots of reverence. “I didn’t really know I wanted to be a director as a teenager, but I saw lots of shows at places like the Oxford Playhouse, so regional theatre and touring theatre are really important to me.”

Banerjee went to university to study English before a Masters in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and it was while at university that he really started to consider theatre as a possible future career. “I did a lot of shows with my student drama society, including quite a bit of Shakespeare, but when I left university I still didn’t know if I wanted to be a director, partly because of the freelance struggle of it all.”

He did, though, clearly love theatre and landed a job at the National Theatre, but in an admin role before taking the leap and deciding to pursue directing full time. He ended up at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and now, as we know, is at the helm of a national tour of Julius Caesar for the RSC. “It wasn’t one of the Shakespeare plays that I knew that well until I got round to applying for the role of director. We know it’s a political play, a play that speaks to our politics, speaks to who gets to be a leader, and asks us to think about what you do when you don’t agree with the people in power,” says the director.

“It’s often done in a way that reflects the age it’s being performed in. For example, the recent production in the Public Theatre in New York where Caesar was made to look like Donald Trump. And Shakespeare himself was writing the play at a time when Elizabeth I was coming to the end of her reign. There had been plots against her, and there was a question of who would succeed her. So even in Shakespeare’s day he was using this Roman story to talk about Elizabethan England and what happens when there is a possible power vacuum.

“I also want to tell a story about power today. There are 48 named characters in the play, of which 46 are men and 2 of them are women. So we’ve cast it in such a way to redress the gender imbalance in the play, so it’s about half and half men and women and one non-binary actor.

“I have cast Brutus and Cassius as women. The production will make people think about their reactions to power when it is held by people who aren’t part of the white male patriarchy that we have all been living in and all do still live in.”

Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, May 2-6, York Theatre Royal, June 13-17.