CAESAR MUST DIE (NR) We begin at the end, thrust into the finale of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The actor playing Brutus is intense, yet there is a deep sadness welling in his eyes. It’s one of the greatest endings in theater, in a play featuring one of the greatest murders. The man playing Brutus’ accomplice in suicide, a hulking imposing figure, cradles Brutus and weeps. The stage lights dim as the play ends. This is not an ordinary production of Julius Caesar, however. The actors do not flee to their dressing rooms, readying themselves for celebration out on the town. In fact, the performers are not actors at all, not in a traditional sense at least. They are inmates—thieves, murderers, Mafia and Camorra killers—rotting in Rome’s Rebibbia maximum-security prison, and when they step off the stage, they return to their cells with their pain, loneliness, rage and regrets.
Writer/director duo the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, came up with the idea to stage Shakespeare behind prison walls after visiting Rebibbia to attend a reading of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by some of the prisoners. The brothers were deeply moved and impressed by the reading of the cantos, so they devised to orchestrate a theatrical production involving the inmates. They could not have picked a more appropriate play.
The themes of Julius Caesar—honor, betrayal, friendship, loyalty, conspiracy, tragedy, murder—resonate with the prisoners, and the illusory line between fiction and reality blurs in riveting ways. We get to know many of the inmates during the audition sequences and hear about their crimes. These men know the brutality of violence firsthand and are no strangers to murder in their hearts. The process of seeing them engage with the material, transforming it through their own experiences and understanding how the play connects with them, is powerfully conveyed. Caesar Must Die is a short work (only 76 minutes) and modest compared to earlier work from the Taviani brothers, but it’s not easily forgotten.
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