The Cry and The Luminaries star Ewen Leslie back on stage in Sydney Theatre Company’s radical reworking of Julius Caesar
Television star Ewen Leslie returns to the stage in a radically reworked – and bloody – Julius Caesar that speaks to our times.
When Ewen Leslie was told the Sydney Theatre Company production of Julius Caesar he had signed up for would be performed by just three actors, he felt “absolutely terrified”. Leslie, an amiable, award-winning stage and screen star, has not performed a Shakespearean role since 2013 and he jokes: “It’s not like you read Julius Caesar and go, ‘Three people? Yes, of course!’”
Leslie has a point: published texts of Shakespeare’s blood-spattered tragedy, which dramatises one of history’s most notorious political murders – the assassination of Roman statesman Julius Caesar – list more than 50 characters, from Caesar to the conflicted conspirator Brutus and plebeians with cameo roles.
The stripped-back production by STC artistic director Kip Williams means there will be little down time for the trio of performers.
“It needs to be a pressure-cooker,” says Leslie, a dual Helpmann Award winner and star of internationally celebrated TV dramas The Cry and Top of the Lake. “There will be scenes where I have the last line and then the next scene where I have the first line.”
Despite his burgeoning screen career, the Western Australia-raised, Sydney-based actor found himself missing theatre last year “and the camaraderie that comes with it. With a show like this especially, we have to have each other’s backs more than ever. There can be no ‘I’m out there for myself’ … We’re all in the deep end together.”
Across his theatre and television roles, the 41-year-old father of two has worked alongside megastars Cate Blanchett, Elisabeth Moss, Nicole Kidman and Jenna Coleman. He tells Review he was drawn to the STC show because his female co-stars, Geraldine Hakewill and Zahra Newman, are “extraordinary actors who are very collaborative”. Like him, they are “willing to fall on their arses in front of each other, usually on a daily, sometimes hourly basis and work together to solve a three-person Caesar”.
He will play the arch manipulator and key conspirator Cassius, Hakewill will tackle Caesar’s ally Mark Antony while Newman will portray Brutus – in a mesmerising performance, she performed Brutus’s key monologue in a lilting Caribbean accent on a recent episode of the ABC’s Q&A.
The real-life assassination of Julius Caesar in 44BCE was brutal and bloody. The Roman dictator was reportedly stabbed 23 times by fell politicians in a Senate chamber, and Leslie confirms the STC show will feature plenty of gore: “It’s not shying away from that. It will be a very visceral production.”
The WAAPA graduate describes Cassius as “a very shrewd political thinker” and compares him to contemporary spin-doctors pulling politicians’ strings from behind the scenes. He says Cassius sees Caesar as a power-hungry tyrant who will put at risk the Roman Republic’s limited version of democracy. “He’s the one who says, ‘something needs to be done here’ and I think he’s smart enough to know he is not the person to lead it (the attack on Caesar).”
Williams’s production, which opens on Monday, will be performed in the round – a first for the recently renovated Wharf Theatre – and will include a fusion of low and hi-tech techniques including Zoom meetings.
“We want to speak to a contemporary audience,’’ Leslie says. “Even though it was written over 400 years ago, this play is still scarily relatable to our current political climate.”
Because of the demands the radically reworked history play places on the cast, Leslie sounds apprehensive about the first run-through he is minutes away from performing when we first speak by phone. Yet in the past, when shouldering hefty Shakespearean roles, he turned in dazzling performances. In 2009 he won his first Helpmann and a Sydney Theatre Award for his double act as Prince Hal/Henry V opposite Blanchett in the STC landmark show, The War of the Roses. The following year he snaffled his second Helpmann for playing the physically deformed charismatic villain, Richard III, for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Then-critic for The Australian, Alison Croggon, said this was “a deeply intelligent performance, physically and emotionally unafraid. It marks the ascension of a remarkable actor.”
Leslie, who grew up in Fremantle, made his screen debut aged 12, in the TV series Ship to Shore, and he punctuates our interview with self-deprecating asides. He is warm and talkative, sometimes giving the impression he is taking you into his confidence but without giving much away. If he weren’t a sought-after actor, he might be a politician, though one with far softer edges than those that feature in Shakespeare’s unsettling tale of power, betrayal and moral corruption. Julius Caesar includes some of Shakespeare’s most quotable lines – “Beware the ides of March!,” “Let slip the dogs of war!” and the heart-rending “Et tu, Brute?” – and Leslie has been struck by “how much the play is an exploration of rhetoric” with central characters “who are extraordinary at how they use rhetoric to influence people and how they use words as weapons”.
He believes this has “huge” resonances with the current political landscape, from Barack Obama seducing audiences with his famous, “Yes we can!” speech to Donald Trump exploiting Twitter to appeal to his base.
Interestingly, in 2017, a New York production of Julius Caesar that depicted Caesar as a Trumpian-style dictator provoked protests and a withdrawal of support by corporate sponsors. (The STC show, Leslie says, doesn’t model Shakespeare’s characters on real politicians.)
He says that for the STC production, in addition to their main roles, he and his co-stars “double up to play a bunch of other characters” with the doubling accentuating just how skilfully the Roman Republic’s politicians manipulated their public.
As for who will play Caesar, Williams wants this to remain a surprise for audiences.
When he was cast in Williams’s production it was to be an end-of-season production for STC. But because NSW’s recent Covid-19 lockdown forced the cancellation or postponement of a string of productions, “it’s the first one back”.
“What has been really heartwarming is how well it’s selling,” Leslie says. Word has it that almost half of the tickets sold out within 24 hours of going on sale. That will be music to the ears of STC management. The company reported in late September it had cancelled 335 performances and was carrying a $10m-plus deficit in the wake of Sydney’s marathon second lockdown.
While many of the city’s pandemic restrictions have lifted, the Julius Caesar cast and crew are undergoing rapid antigen testing every week. The actors are rehearsing mask-free, while everyone else at rehearsals wears one.
“It’s helpful that it’s a very small cast,” Leslie muses. “I have two small children – a two-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy – so I’m not out on weekends hitting the pubs.”
That this production marks his first theatre role in six years, and his first Shakespearean role in eight years, reflects how Leslie’s screen career took off after a series of career-defining stage roles. After he starred in The Daughter, Simon Stone’s film adaptation of his acclaimed Belvoir St production The Wild Duck, Leslie decided to pursue more screen work even though he was in the “fortunate position of being offered lots of (theatre) roles, including roles that I thought I would never get the chance to play”.
His partner, film and television producer Nicole O’Donohue, also worked on The Daughter and he says that “I hit a point in my career where I went ‘I have to take a risk and see if I can get some screen work … It’s now or never’.”
In 2015, The Piano director Jane Campion went to Belvoir St Theatre to see him play Chekhov’s Ivanov, a failed scholar whose wife is dying but who is nonetheless unfaithful, depressive and self-involved. He says, laughing, that “there could not have been a less sympathetic character … but Jane went, ‘Oh he’d be really good as the one really good man in the second series of Top of the Lake.’”
His first child, Elliott, was born five years ago and daughter Eve followed three years after that. Interestingly, he has found that film shoots can be more family-friendly than theatre’s eight performances a week routine.
“You show up, you shoot things, you only have to do it once. It all sort of worked, on a professional level but also on a life level.”
As fans of the 2018 abduction thriller The Cry will know, Ivanov and Richard III are not the only twisted characters he has portrayed.
He was asked to star in this ABC-BBC co-production opposite Coleman – the petite Doctor Who and Victoria star – after BBC executives saw him in the first episode of SBS’s refugee saga Safe Harbour. (That provocative SBS series, which is also streaming on Hulu, asks viewers: Would you risk your life to help a boatload of desperate refugees?)
The Cry, meanwhile, is about a middle class couple whose baby goes missing soon after they arrive in Australia from the UK. Leslie admits he had no idea how dark his character, Alistair, was even after he read the first episode’s script. (Alistair is a political spin doctor who cruelly manipulates his emotionally fragile fiancee, played by Coleman.) He chuckles in a self-mocking way as he recalls how “he seemed a bit unlikeable but you know, he’s busy, I get it … And then by ep four it’s like, ‘Oh it’s absolutely worse than I thought!’.’’
Still, he found “there was a strange freedom in it initially, because I didn’t have to worry about the audience liking me. And, in fact, there was nothing I could possibly do that was going to make them like me.”
Given the drama’s often harrowing depiction of grieving parents under pressure, he describes the 10-week shoot in Australia and Scotland as “incredibly intense” and “a hard one to shake off … By the end it goes to a place that is unforgivable. The only way I could go into it is the fact that I am a father and beyond the horrible choices he’s making, he believes they are for the best reasons, so I have to find those.
“Most of the time with acting, it’s like 90 per cent empathy. Even with playing Richard III, you’ve got to find a way in to at least see things from your character’s point of view, whether or not you personally agree with it.”
The Cry was a huge hit for the BBC; it earned high praise from critics and was watched by almost six million viewers in the UK, although the reaction from fans towards his gaslighting character led to a “don’t jump on Twitter situation,” he quips. “When it came out in Australia I put on my protective armour because I was like, ‘OK, I’m about to get a lot of hate for this.’ But I was very proud of my work in it.”
His other recent screen credits include the 2019 Stan crime drama The Gloaming and 2020’s Operation Buffalo, an ABC satire about Britain’s 1950s nuclear tests at Maralinga.
He stars in another BBC miniseries, The Luminaries, that launched in Australia on Paramount Plus last month and explores love, murder and horoscopes against the backdrop of the 1860s New Zealand gold fields. It’s based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton, and was shot there in the months before Covid-19 struck. Leslie’s body lies – literally – at the centre of the murder mystery about who killed his character, Crosbie Wells. Wells, a “mass of contradictions”, is married to a con artist and brothel owner played by former Bond girl Eva Green. The drama has two time frames and Leslie jokes that “for the first one I’m dead on the table giving an incredible performance, and then it jumps back in time.”
That this in-demand actor is back before the footlights is a testament to the enduring appeal of Shakespeare. Leslie reflects: “You have these swathes of text that are very poetic and very flowery, for want of a better word, and all of a sudden you have these sentences that just go boom, that could be from now. You have these sentences that punch out, that feel very modern. I think that’s why we keep coming back to these plays.”
Julius Caesar opens at Sydney’s Wharf Theatre on Monday.
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