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Q: What are the key features of Julius Caesar did you want to pull out in the design process?
The blood! The rain! The intensity. And the fact that it's a piece you have to hear clearly. It's about public speaking and the power of words and how words can be used as weapons. That has to be the centre of the play – you can't cloud that with too much visual stuff. You have to be able to hear the play.
Q: You've designed Caesar before – how did this affect your process this time?
I designed it for the Young Vic not so long ago in a smaller space. I was interested in doing it in the RST because it's a much larger space. I thought I wouldn't refer to my previous work at all, having worked with a different director and actors with a different approach at a different time, but inevitably things came back to me. I realised how much I knew the play, not even from reading the lines but from hearing the lines in rehearsal, tech and previews. It had gone in like a favourite tune. It was more than five years ago, but hearing the actors speak the lines this time, I knew every word. That familiarity had been in me when I was designing the play. Maybe that's why it was a much easier process to design it this time!
Q: On the Exploring Shakespeare website, we can watch an extract from Act 3 Scene 2. In this scene, why do you use microphones and a raised platform?
The microphones – we worked very closely with two freelance sound designers. They brought to it a "radio play" version of Caesar which fits with the idea of words as weapons as these are the big powerful speeches in the play.
All the set needed to do was find a way of presenting that. We could have been naturalistic and made it a sound studio or a radio station or a platform at speech day, something that you'd recognise. Shakespeare asks for a "pulpit". No one refers to it in the dialogue but in the stage directions it's called a pulpit. Of course pulpits aren't remotely Roman! That's Shakespeare not being obsessed with the detail of Rome, but finding the spirit of Rome. So I had to find the spirit of what it means to be on a raised platform, like a soapbox in Hyde Park. Everyone must have had that experience of being in a bit group and needing to make yourself heard – you'll stand on a chair or table, anything to lift you up. I wanted the simplest, quickest, easiest way so we had this notion of the floor just raising, like a floating platform that would just fold out of the floor for that moment. It didn't have to be an object that had to be carried on and carried off.
Q: What was the most difficult thing about working on Caesar and Antony at the same time?
I suppose as a designer, working with two directors, that's tricky. At times Kandis [Cook, Costume Designer] and I would meet to try to pull the plays together just to make sense of it for ourselves. In reality there were two directors taking the two plays in very different directions. In the end, there is a link between the plays but this has happened through the rehearsal process, not by us saying, for example, that whenever we see the army, they must wear red. It's become a much subtler link. I think that's an honest approach to the plays - Shakespeare didn't write them as a double bill even thought they have shared characters and storylines. That was the trickiest thing – keeping a line through both of them when, for example, the casting of the young Mark Antony looked nothing like the older Mark Antony but that didn't seem to matter, because when Antony was a younger man, he is clearly very different to the man he become in Antony and Cleopatra. You just have to keep an open mind - you when you go into rehearsal and are hit with another new idea. Your job as a designer is to keep calm and absorb it, and find out how it fits with your thinking about the play.
