Performing Crime As Catharsis: Julius Caesar in a High Security Jail

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DANIELA CARPI Performing Crime as Catharsis: Julius Caesar in a High Security Jail

How does the contemporary common man react to Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Cae- sar? Which are the components that strike him/her and make Shakespeare once more "our contemporary?" The movie Cesare deve morire (Caesar must die) by the Taviani brothers (2012, in collaboration with Fabio Cavalli as production director) is a fasci- nating example of how and where Shakespeare can be performed as well as reshaped in order to be morphed into an educational and edifying message for an unusual public, in this case the inmates of the Rebibbia high security jail in Rome. The movie was presented at the 62nd International Film Festival in Berlin, where it received the Gold- en Bear. The performance was carried out in the context of the jail's theatrical labora- tory, an initiative that has the function of helping inmates to overcome their isolation and to reintegrate themselves into everyday life. In other words, such an experiment can be labeled as docu-drama since the "actors" merge the art of performing, which they are just improvising and learning, with the personal analysis of their own criminal lives. In fact, Shakespearean passages are interspersed with the inmates' own re- marks on the timelessness of the text itself: they constantly find links between Shake- speare's portrayal of Renaissance society and issues connected to power, betrayal, and sin in their contemporary world. The inmates live in a maximum security prison and have been sentenced to many years of incarceration for mafia-related crimes: thus the blood they shed in the tragedy is already on their hands and on their minds. Obviously, these are not professional actors, yet their own life experiences compensate for their lack of expertise: in the performance they give voice to events from their own lives, therefore performing in a film for them becomes a sort of public confession of their crimes and induces a ca- thartic process. The audience should keep in mind that the crimes they have commit- ted do not invalidate their humanity. This is why the director sets up an audition in which he asks the inmates to act spontaneously, as a demonstration of their humanity. In particular, they must show that they can utter a banal piece of information (such as data about their legal status) in two ways: first in a tearful, emotional tone, where the speaker imagines himself crushed by the realization that he will not see his loved ones for years, and then in an angry tone, where words are shouted and cried out violently, as an expression of rebellion against authority. In the movie, mafia ritual is constantly in the background. For example, there must not be any oath of allegiance among the conspirators, but only a handshake, which is characteristic of the mafia code of honour, as well as the emphasis on the difference between a man of honour and an 'infame' (despicable man): in Italian the term 'infame' is used to describe someone who betrays the code of honour of a criminal organization. Moreover, some characters address Caesar with the greeting "I kiss your hands," which in Southern Italy is still the typical homage paid to a mafia boss. In other words, the inmates' performance highlights the analogy between the characteristics of the conspiracy in Shakespeare's text and the socio/political background of the prisoners in actual time.

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28.2 (September 2017): 139-146.

One of the inmates notes that the rebellion against a supposed tyrant is what has actually taken place in a neighborhood of his own town: therefore what he is acting out is something that is part of his life. Someone else, while uttering the words "Bru- tus is a man of honour," stops and meditates on the concept that, from a criminal perspective, is characteristic of most of the inmates. After all, they are all men of honour: shedding blood, taking revenge, questioning justice, these are all matters of honour. Another interesting element highlighted in the movie is the debate of the concept of justice. Brutus says that they do not have to kill Antony because what they are carrying out is not revenge, but ritual. They do not execute a slaughter, they perform an act of justice: "And we are actors of justice." But Cassius says: "Aren't betrayals and killings customary things in our house?" Here again a new debate on how to dis- pense justice takes place. Within the mafia organization, if you do not have the cour- age to kill, you are considered a 'quaquaraqua,' a useless man.1 Once more the contemporary sense of honour of a criminal organization superimposes itself on the reading of Julius Caesar. As I have argued elsewhere, the Renaissance foreshadowed some elements that were to reach their climax in the late 20th century: "What may sound as daring and scientifically impossible to sustain, given the large distance between the two periods, becomes evident if we look thoroughly into the social, philosophical and political characteristics that typify the Elizabethan period and the postmodern one" (Carpi 2013, 177). The inmates realize that they are actually staging the violent events of Winter Journals contemporary Rome and Nigeria. For instance, the conspirators are people who must convince themselves to act violently against Caesar, even though they are not intrinsi- cally against him. Thus an inmate correctly asserts that the plotters are indeed part of a criminal organization, a clan within a mafia organization that decidesPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) to eliminate the boss. Each conspirator must confront the harsh decision of whether or not to refuse to act against his own will, or to undertake what he is forced to do. The conspira-

for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution tors, just as the inmates of this particular jail, were forced to obey orders: Cassius convinces Brutus to take action, and the rest of the comrades follow suit. It is a power struggle where one must decide whom to side with. The film alternates scenes in colour with scenes in black and white, which helps the viewer understand which scenes are completed and which ones are still in progress. In the latter ones the actors repeat certain passages over and over again: the spectator is made aware of the extent to which the text affects the interpreter and how he must re-elaborate it in order to be able to perform it. Reading, interpreting, com- menting and then performing: the introjection of the text is part of the theatre experi- ence. The director actually tells his actors that they first have to read their roles, then they have to say them aloud: in this way they can listen to their own voices, thus changing the text by means of their own intonation. Most of the movie is devoted to exposing the inner turmoil the text causes within the actors' psyches and the gradual transformation of each inmate into the character he must interpret. Besides the neces- sary stage instructions ("Don't go to the window, because Brutus doesn't want to see Caesar's coronation," says the director, and Brutus crouches down so that he learns what is happening only through Cassius' words), what emerges is the single actor's confrontation with the text itself. The emotions highlighted in the play are the emotions of the actors themselves: thus the debate on friendship between Cassius and Brutus implies a debate on friendship within the jail's walls.

1 It is the writer Sciascia who distinguishes between "Omini, ominicchi e quaquaraqua" (real men, half men and nonentities) in Il giorno della civetta.

Furthermore, in the sequence where the stage is being prepared, the grumble of one of the workers, "we are only slaves," appears to be the complaint of the Roman populace that is relentlessly being exploited by those in control. The fact that the populace is constantly manipulated by power is made evident by the scene centred on the funeral orations of Brutus and Antony. The event is set in the jail's empty courtyard, with all the inmates watching from their cells behind bars. Hands, feet and voices emerge as from a cage, as if the mob were imprisoned by superstition, law, and power and could be easily manipulated. The mob is never free because it cannot han- dle liberty, hence in the film Cassius' declaration becomes a focal point: "Under a new government your vote will be as important as the one of us all." This sentence, ad- dressed by Brutus to Antony, is a powerful foreshadowing of a democratic government. But we know from the text that the Renaissance masses are not ready for this form of government, because they cry "Let Brutus be king," thus demonstrating that they can only accept an absolute ruler. We are inside the performance itself even before it actually starts, because we witness the gradual transformation of each inmate into the character he must embody. The whole text explodes and what we are left with is a conundrum, a puzzle: in this way, each segment of the text acquires a particular weight through the effort of each actor striving to find the best way to convey his message to the audience. This is how Hamlet's instructions to the actors are modernized and universalized. We are thus metatheatrically placed behind the scene and witness the effort of as- similation and memorization, the way in which the inmates gradually transform themselves into the tragedy's characters. In Nietzschean terms, we may speak of a Diony- sian and an Apollonian approach: the former (the black and white scenes) comprise the scenes that have not yet acquired their final form, but are still being slowly assimi- lated by the actors and are characterized by sudden intuitions of interpretation; the latter ones encompass the scenes that the director considers final. The play actually opens with the end, where Brutus asks his friends and comrades to kill him. The open- ing scene in bold colours is followed by a flashback sequence in black and white, which describes the action in progress. A reference to the neoclassical painter Vincenzo Cammuccini's (1771-1844) rep- resentation of Caesar's death reinforces this distinction. In this painting the dominat- ing feature is the architectural space; this characteristic, together with the histrionic gestures of the characters, makes obvious its analogy to staged spectacles. In fact Cammuccini's narrative structure derived from theatrical sources – specifically the tragedies Brutus (1789) and Virginia (1783) by Vittorio Alfieri – and it is not unlikely that the influence of these plays carried over to his overall visual organization (Hie- singer 1978). In the same way, in the movie the scene where the warriors are prepar- ing for the battle of Philippi re-echoes an analogous use of space: the gestures are violent, the colours very sombre, with a predominance of black and red. A sort of podium or sloping surface in the middle of the stage, on which the different actors alternately climb, helps create this sense of violent movement. Both the architectural structuring of space and the chosen colours invite this pictorial comparison, thus em- phasizing the fact that the scenes in colour represent the finalized artistic act. This dichotomy between theatrical action in progress and completed work of art under- scores the dramatic movement within the performance and once more it conveys the tragic effect described in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, with the fusion of the Dyonisian and Apollonian perspectives.

As mentioned above, the film is shot as a flashback: it opens with Brutus's planned suicide, as he realizes that his aspirations have been defeated and the ghost of Caesar takes its revenge. "Are you still so powerful, Caesar?" asks Brutus. Blood is repaid with blood and violent actions; even if generated by ideological intentions, it can only produce more blood. However, Brutus's greatness is emphasized ("This is a man"). His downfall will convey an Aeschylean message; man is doomed, but he can cry out his greatness by choosing the moment of his death, thus depriving fate of its victory. Man is subjected to fate but his struggle can be heroic in the acceptance of his downfall while struggling to the very end. The action of suicide through murder shows the unredeemed willpower of Brutus, who accepts defeat by fate (Caesar's death becomes useless and his memory will be avenged) but deprives his enemies of the glory of killing him. This sort of ideology also typifies Cleopatra's death in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, where the queen's staging of her death is a testimony to her grandeur even in her defeat. This theme powerfully emerges at the very end, where Brutus asks his comrades to kill him but nobody wants to undertake the burden of this duty. Only his closest friend will accomplish what may be defined as an act of euthanasia ante litteram. Actually Brutus is already spiritually dead: the realization of his failure, the fact that Rome will never be freed of tyrannical power, the awareness that his betrayal of Cae- sar has been useless make him feel the desertification of his ideological action. What he asks of his friends is to help him kill himself. The heavy burden of fate that crushes all of man's aspirations comes to the fore in Brutus' dialogue with Caesar's ghost, where the ghost implies the inevitable punishment of sin. Man fails but his only greatness consists, classically, in depriving fate of its victory by challenging death. Both at the beginning and at the end of the play the people in the audience are part of the spectacle: we see the crowds streaming out of the theatre, thus sharing in the performance. Their coloured attire, their gait, their coming out in groups or alone contribute to the movement of the action. We are never out of the theatre, also because the jail itself has become a theatre, thus recalling Shakespeare's own words "All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, 2.7.140-1). Indeed, when the actors take off their costumes and don their normal prison garb they are still part of a movie. Shakespeare constantly reminds us that we are only dreams, dreams dreamt by a demiurge such as Prospero in The Tempest; Calde- ron de la Barca, and, later on, Borges in the 20th century – repeat over and over again. We never cease to act and we are constantly on some stage, be it the world, the prison cell or the theatre. But how is the play performed? It is interesting to note that once more Hamlet's instructions to the actors are there in the background. The director actually teaches his improvised performers to act naturally, harmonizing words, tone of voice, body language; moreover every inmate is encouraged to use his own parlance: "When you speak dialect you speak yourself," says one of the actors during an interview. That is to say, dialect helps the actor to express his own nature, it enhances his emotions. Thus, a proliferation of accents ensues. In addition, as noted above, the director's insistence on the use of emotions comes to the fore during the auditions. Each would- be actor must pass a test: he has to pronounce a simple sentence first neutrally, then as if under the influence of strong passions. Emotions must harmonize words, tone, and gestures. Some inmates refuse to comply with this request because they consider it a weakness: giving vent to one's emotions is not considered manly and it would mean betraying the hidden code of honour shared by the inmates; it would mean exposing

one's innermost soul. Moreover, obeying the injunctions of a director could also be interpreted as giving in to state power, being reintegrated within a social code and accepting its rules. "Rebel against these ideas:" these are the words of an inmate. He realizes that they are being asked to stage ideas that are part of a status quo, of a codified system. The educational function that the staging of the play represents could actually be seen as a reintegration into a social system, whereas the prisoner should be a rebel par excellence. The staging of the play becomes a system within a system, with its codified rules of behaviour, but the most hardened inmates cannot accept being part of an order. With regard to this point, the analysis of the speeches given by the various characters (particularly Brutus and Antony) shows how power is inherent in every speech act. This is why some of the prisoners refuse to perform, precisely because they feel that they would be part of a power structure (Carpi 2003, 104). What also emerges here is the interchange between subversion and the legitimacy of power, and hence the impossibility to criticize power without, at the same time, confirming it. On the other hand, according to Foucault, any subversive strategy is also a power strategy, because the nature of power is so pervasive and "devious" as to render the binary opposition power/subversion virtually pointless (see 1980). Green- blatt's premise that no possibility to overthrow the establishment ever exists (see 1980 and 1989) would seem to be confirmed in Julius Caesar. In similar dramatic works, which appear subversive because of a crime of high treason, the subversion parabola becomes the fundamental means for maintaining power. The educational function of this theatre project is stressed by an inmate's surprise at the great enthusiasm he feels for what he is reading: he wonders how the study of De Bello Gallico could have appeared so boring when he was in school: "Caesar is a great man," he exclaims. His work on Shakespeare's tragedy makes him realize the importance of culture and art. The fact that each inmate uses his own dialect gives the play a popular hue: what prevails is the interpretation that each single actor gives to the text. The Shakespeare- an text is made more accessible through this particular language that is not universal but carries within itself the psychology of each single interpreter. Through the use of dialect the director wants to show that the Shakespearean text allows for the presence of the singular and the universal at the same time. A local parlance makes the text personal but the moral message is universal: it speaks of power, betrayal, ideology and economic interest and the inmates realize that what they are staging is valid even in their own time. Particularly interesting is the sequence that describes the setting of Caesar's coronation. The scene is performed twice. The first time Brutus follows Cassius' invitation to watch the event from a window. Then, the director's voice suggests Brutus' unwill- ingness to witness Caesar's triumph, which is why the scene is repeated with Brutus crouching below the window, listening to Cassius' words while he describes (and at the same time creates) the scene. We can hear the cries of the crowd but what once more prevails is the interpretation of what is taking place off stage. The same situation exists in Shakespeare. We cannot formulate our own perspective, because we are not allowed to watch what is happening with our own eyes. Another emblematic scene, as mentioned above, is the one where Brutus gives his funeral speech. Brutus is alone in the middle of the prison's bare courtyard; his speech thus almost takes on the quality of an interior monologue. The inmates watch his performance from behind the bars of their cells. The idea of imprisonment is therefore double: the inmates are trapped in their cells (physical imprisonment) just as Brutus is

trapped within himself (his ideology). This is why he asserts that what they are com- mitting is not a murder because it is accomplished not in a vengeful way, but as a ritual action aimed at freeing Rome from tyranny. The starkness of the Elizabethan scene is re-created, hence the strong predominance of the uttering voice that also has the function of narrativizing previous events. In the same way, Antony stands alone in the middle of the courtyard; likewise, his speech works as a sort of interior monologue, since his indictment of the conspirators is indirect. Narrativity is a major theme in the movie, because the improvised actors continu- ously summarize the parts of the plot they must perform: action is anticipated by narration and integrated with the events pertaining to the actor's previous lives, thus mixing fragments of reality and fiction. Moreover, since Shakespeare's tragedy is not performed in its entirety, the movie focuses only on the scenes of Caesar's killing, on some parts of the funeral orations, and on the battlefield: narration is essential to con- nect these scenes to the missing ones. This device also demonstrates the particular focus that the director wants to give to the text through an emphasis on power, betrayal and defeat. Narrativity is also what chracterises The Tempest, where Prospero is forced to nar- rate what happened before to Miranda; but narrativity is also the main characteristic of Seneca's theatre, which did not portray violent actions on the stage. Thus influ- ences from antiquity are modernized and brought up-to-date. But let us go back to Shakespeare's famous sentence: "All the world's a stage:" in Caesar must die we do not have only one stage, because each single cell in the jail becomes a personal stage on which the inmate prepares his performance. The stage is spread out so as to include all the individual spaces the inmates inhabit: it is the re- creation of a macrocosm on a smaller scale, where the cell is the microcosm within a limited macrocosm. In other words, the inclusion of the whole space known to the inmates makes the sentence "All the world's a stage" ring true: all their circumscribed world has become a stage. The prison is going to be their world for years, a dimin- ished world of penance; but the performance has extended their world so as to engulf the whole cosmos in this play of universals. But everything is theatricalized, even the audience. As a matter of fact, when at the end the improvised theatre is being disman- tled and the spectators themselves leave the stage which they have shared with the actors, a sudden impression of a void is created, the same void the inmate impersonat- ing Brutus experiences when he asserts that the awareness of art has made him feel the limits/non-limits of his cell. The juxtaposition limit/limitless represents an ongo- ing debate in the course of the movie. The staging of Caesar's death is a choral scene, where every character participates in the assassination and the rest of the inmates watch the crime from their cells. The comments on what the audience is witnessing are focused on the many times this scene will be acted out: the stage is extended from the Renaissance to the jail, to the present time, to the future, as a never-ending performance, a sort of living theatre that will involve whoever re-reads this historical event in its symbolic valence, thus anticipating all the possible languages that will be used to interpret the play in the future. The endlessness of interpretation is stressed and the actors become aware that they are only one link in a chain of re-readings. The text never ends and the various performances that have characterized the play across the centuries give form to a vast critical text. What I argued about Dr. Faustus also is relevant to this play: from a sublime aspi- ration to conquer the world through science (in the case of Faustus) or through free-

dom (the freeing of Rome from tyranny), in the end Brutus' aspirations shrink and end in a tomb. Evil baffles and deceives: it seduces at first, but plunges the sinner into desperation and damnation. Faustus wishes to be a sparrow, so as to become just a link in the great chain of being in order not to be responsible for his actions. Brutus looks at death as his only escape and is reduced to begging to be killed. His doubts at the apparition of Caesar's ghost are reminiscent of similar doubts expressed by Ham- let: who is the ghost? Is it an angel or a demon? Is it really Caesar who has come back to Earth to demand his revenge or is it a demon that is trying to seduce Brutus? At any rate it is forbidden to commit violent acts against oneself: self-slaughter is a sin from a religious perspective. As Horst Zander puts it, even if Brutus affirms that he wants to kill Caesar's spirit and not his body, Brutus merely kills the man, whereas the spirit of Caesar ironically derives more power than ever before from this very murder. The disembodied Caesar is mightier than the living one; in fact, even his corpse – to which Antony gives a voice - is more eloquent than the living Caesar ever was. (Zander 2005, 6) It is actually Caesar's ghost/spirit that gets its revenge for Brutus's betrayal (cf. Carpi 2016). As a concluding remark on the performance, we must reflect on an emblematic sentence uttered by one of the actors: "Since I have come to know art this cell has become a prison." This sentence is ambiguous, because in fact the inmates have found freedom through art. Their minds have been nourished by art, hence the prison walls no longer constrict them. They have been freed inside their minds; and actually in the final part of the movie we learn that one of them has become a professional actor and another one has become a writer. Art has offered the inmates a new beginning after their prison term, a new reason to live. Moreover, they have been taught to read, and to read between the lines: education has proven a fundamental tool for the reintegration of a former outcast into everyday life. In addition, Brutus is indeed like Everyman in the famous Medieval morality play: he has squandered his life among struggles over power, crimes and false ideologies and now he must face death. Nobody goes with him to the very end, because all his past friends abandon him and do not answer his desperate call. Only one friend re- mains who, out of true friendship, helps him kill himself, as if to say that above and beyond all worldly enchantments and seductions only humanity, solidarity, and friendship will remain to the very end.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chi- cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. —. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. Hiesinger, Ulrich. "The Paintings of Vincenzo Cammuccini, 1771-1844." The Art Bulletin 60.2 (1978): 297-320. Zander, Horst. "Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy." Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays. Ed. Horst Zander. London: Routledge, 2005. 3-56.