Stratford Trip Essay on The Roman Actor.
The Roman Actor, a play containing plays which are crucial to the outer play's development. A story about passion, romance, death, defiance and above all: power. Set in the time period where the world's greatest empire was probably the Roman Empire and therefore power already played a major role within the Roman society. The ruler of such a vast Empire would, needless to say, have a hard time to keep his/her feet firmly planted in the ground and Caesar (the ruler) was floating way up high in the sky. Your standard megalomaniac, with a constant obsession that his power should be maintained and even if the possibility would arise that his power and desires would be in any threat he would have that possibility extinguished before it had time to take form. .
Quality of acting.
The role of Caesar would very obviously be a very difficult role to play since you would have to have the audience believe that you had enough in yourself to maintain such a great power. And your poise and stature would have to be so perfect so that you at least looked like a half decent Emperor. .
I would have never imagined that anyone could or would have portrayed Caesar in such a manner that it would seem comical to the audience and would make the audience laugh, and that is exactly what Anthony Sher did. And it was truly a brilliant performance. .
He portrayed Caesar as a spoilt, rich kid who was extremely paranoid about everything you could imagine, his wives, his fame, his power, and his riches, simply everything. And this paranoia of his was what made it so funny. Especially the way he said "off with his head", like it was some tiny trivial thing and didn"t even bat an eyelid when he said it. He only had some difficulty with killing Parris and his wife, Domitia, who in the end kills him, so Caesar made a big mistake by not killing her. .
But all and all the portrayal provided by Anthony Sher was in my eyes impeccable and no one could have done a better job.