T
he 7th Magpies Theatre Company is dedicated to staging irreverent and challenging productions that interrogate the state of the world and raise vital questions about our future. As a company we aim to provide artists the opportunity to collaborate and take risks with thought provoking plays. The 7th Magpies Julius Caesar aims to explore what happens when a generation, placated with false notions of freedom, reach their limits and challenge what is left for them in an exhausted world. The anger, the desperation, the longing for beauty, the longing for another world; that’s at the heart of our production. Our the and our
adaptation delves deep into austere reality of revolution asks urgent questions about young, apathetic generation.
Julius Journalist Veronica Aloess talks to Director Charlton O’Connor and Dramaturg Ash Rowbin about their rehearsal process and creative vision. For 7th Magpies Theatre Company, “the play is always the point of departure.” Dramaturg, Ash Rowbin explains how they will be devising around Shakespeare’s original text in line with their company’s vision for a collaborative way of working with its actors. “It’s not the finished article, which is how a lot of companies in Britain treat plays; they take the text as it is and realise it. I do think we have this thing about staging things very literally. For us, it’s about taking this play and seeing what we can do with it metaphorically: taking it out of its original context and transporting it to another.” In short, their vision is to take a play about autocracy and approach it democratically.
But how do you take a five hundred year old play and make it relevant now? Director O’Connor explains that, “we’re using Julius Caesar to explore the clashes between the people in power now and our disaffected youth. There are a lot of things people aren’t happy about in the world today, especially our generation; there’s a lack of opportunities, a kind of silencing in art, and we want to use Julius Caesar to explore what if we actually said, ‘no, we’re not going to take this, we’re going to change it.”
Violence breeds violence. One of the questions we’d like to raise is, is history just going to repeat itself?
In their unconventional production, “the first half of the play remains pretty true to Julius Caesar – apart from the setting which will be more conceptualised.”Rowbin explains in more depth, “in the first half we’ll be exploring the overthrow of power. The subject matter is still relevant; look at what’s going on in Syria, Egypt
– that’s the thing, there’s never a final revolution, revolution is ongoing. Look at the French Revolution: what followed was the Reign of Terror, then after that Napoleon Bonaparte. Violence breeds violence. So one of the questions we’d like to raise is, is history just going to repeat itself?” They’ll be using the second act to explore this question in more depth, Rowbin reflects that, “it’s worth saying that we’re completely dissolving the play.” Shakespeare may be considered one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived, but both Rowbin and O’Connor feel, “Julius Caesar has a spectacular first act, it explores lots of really interesting questions. But once Caesar’s dead, and the two sides have been established in what essentially becomes a civil war, then I think it loses its way. It just stops asking questions.” So it’s not for want of reverence for Shakespeare that they approach his work in this way, O’Connor simply believes that, “when the text no longer serves the questions that we’re trying to raise, then why shouldn’t we find other ways of doing that?” To facilitate this, 7th Magpies Theatre Company will be
devising their second half. When I speak to them, they have nothing written down yet, “we’re going to take the company of actors, other sources, texts, and create something new out of that,” Rowbin illustrates the process. At the centre of this is the thought that, “theatre needs to be open to change. What this project started as has now matured. I think speaking of an end product can be a dangerous thing, because we don’t want it to be that.”
I wanted to stage it somewhere that could capture the idea of a fallen world. Talk of theatre as a product grates on Rowbin, “we don’t want this production to be it, we’d rather have a German system where productions play in rep and we’re staging them for years.” It leads the conversation down a very political route in which Rowbin admits, “I think every play that I ever make will be designed to destroy capitalism and show it for what it is. Capitalism is a form of oppression, it’s not the same oppression of say, Nazi Germany,
it’s a silent oppression. People are placated with products, made very comfortable, and we’re not always aware of how oppressed we are.” So in line with this thought, the world which they’re setting this production in “isn’t that far from the world we’re living in now.” This made finding a venue which “would aid the telling of our story” essential. “We probably spent a solid 2-3 months trying to find a location. It’s basically a gutted out church. There’s still a lot of religious people in the world, but there is a significant lack of faith, a lack of community – anything we can hold on to that’s dear to us. More people probably think about their Facebook page than reading or politics or actually talking. It’s such a vain world we’re obsessed with and I wanted to stage it somewhere that could potentially capture that idea of a fallen world. We don’t build anything like that anymore, anything we build lasts us a day.” Rowbin adds, “It’s interesting to compare what we worship now and worship in the play, in a venue which was formerly a place of worship. I like those connotations.” I question Rowbin further
about his opinion as a writer, on reimagining classical writing for our contemporary world, “It’s almost about not being afraid to destroy Shakespeare. I hate hearing playwrights say ‘I could never write a play as good as that’, because if that’s what you think, why are you even bothering? Modesty is the quality of the lukewarm, said Sartre, you ought to have some sort of belief in yourself. You should aspire to the heights of Shakespeare if you’re going to achieve anything, shouldn’t you?” It’s an inspiring way to think, and explains why this company have the balls to tackle the bard for their first production. Whilst interviewing O’Connor and Rowbin, a lot of our discussion often leads us to talk about politics, and it’s easy to get a sense that these theatre-makers feel an affinity with the characters in Julius Caesar. They tell me about meeting director Katie Mitchell, whilst they were in Germany. Apparently the short but sweet words of advice she had for them were: ‘Never compromise’. “I think we’ve taken that on 110%,” O’Connor reflects, and it’s pretty plain to see. These two seem determined to start a revolution of their own in British theatre.
CAST Jessica Butcher Cinna Charlton O’Connor Marcus Brutus Sophie Dickson Portia and Metellus Cimber Holly Elmes Caius Ligarius Alexander Forsyth Cassius Carrie Hill Casca Callum King Artemidorous Rachel Lea-Gray Trebonius and Cinna the Poet Jamal Renaldo Mark Anthony and
Ian Recordon Julius Caesar
CREATIVE Directors Charlton O’Connor Ash Rowbin Producer Victoria Lavelle
Marketing Director Joe Shellard
Lighting Designer Jai Morjaria
Sound Designer Gerran Howell
Casting Director Gabriella Shimeld-Fenn
Journalist Veronica Aloess
Trailer Producer Nathan Hussein
Trailer Sound Designer Kieron Johnston
Photographer jack Reed
SFX Paul While
Box Office AdelphiTickets.com
The 7th Magpies are grateful for the support of Dave Allen Stuart Benson Lois Charlton Ruth Charlton Frances Coleman
Amy Insole Eleanor Jarvis Anne MacDonald Daniel O’Connor Derek Walker
The 7th Magpies are supported and mentored by the National Theatre Young Studio.
In conversation with 7th Magpies By Veronica Aloess
“This is the first play that we’ve ever put on with 7th Magpies Theatre Company,” director Charlton O’Connor (CO) tells me. Out of earshot, Dramaturg Ash Rowbin (AR) echoes my own thoughts, “props to Charlton for tackling Shakespeare with her first play. Not only that, she’s doing something very conceptual, very courageous with it; that takes a lot of guts.”
O’Connor and Rowbin explain to me how they found themselves experiencing the same revolution in their way of thinking about theatre, which brought them together creatively to collaborate on Julius Caesar. AR: For quite a long time I was really dedicated to realism, and that partly comes from the fact we both trained on the Foundation course at RADA. I
love realism; O’Neill, Chekhov, Ibsen, that felt like the pinnacle of art for me – I’d say that’s the trajectory we’ve taken in British theatre. Then something happened that just changed everything: I went to see Three Kingdoms by Simon Stephens at the Lyric Hammersmith, and it just blew my mind. I’d never seen braver work, I’d never seen actors do what they did on stage, I’d never seen a text ripped apart like that, it was wholly new. That’s what you want from theatre, something that’s going to stay with you. What it did more than anything was instil this desire in me to find something that I just wasn’t getting from British theatre. CO: I felt like I’ve just had this incredible frustration for the past two years since I moved to London. As long as I’ve known I’ve just wanted to act, to create something with other people. But I think there’s a problem – especially as a female and as an actor – that we’re treated like puppets, and there’s no freedom, only this fear of it because something might go wrong on the night. But then, I think it will inevitably go wrong because you lose creativity, you’re putting dead things on stage.
Their mutual sense of frustration took them on a journey to Germany. AR: Because I’d heard Three Kingdoms’ influences were very mainland European, I decided we had to go to Berlin and that was when things just sort of crystalized. CO: There’s just something more electric and alive and you don’t know what could happen, and I don’t know if I’ve seen that in Britain. AR: It feels like a piece of art. Thomas Ostermeier’s was the first work I encountered in Germany. It’s a bit of a cliché but German theatre is a director’s theatre, there’s such rigour to the work there. He took Hamlet, and to my mind he said Hamlet is a mess and made it mess. It’s things like that which inspire me, that dedication to concept. CO: There’s watching a story play out and then this was something else. AR: After Germany, things changed. I went through a real transitory period. After doing things a certain way for so long, it was like someone had set my gods on fire in front of me, and
what could I do with the ashes? What they did was channel this frustration into putting on a show. “It got to a point where I thought: I’ve told too many people about this project, it has to go on,” says O’Connor. “Following Germany, there were a series of failed projects, we started to explore ways of working with my own company, but they never made it to the stage,” Ash says. “I think it’s about trying to find collaborators so you’re all in the same process,” Charlton explains that’s how 7th Magpies Theatre Company came to be, “Ash and I share the same ideas, we’re a great team.” AR: It’s hard to find people that are open to such an abstract way of working. I say that like these companies don’t exist – it’s just that I didn’t know about them until after Germany. People like Forced Entertainment; they’re a group of friends who met at university who shared similar ideas and had this very playful and open collaborative way of working. I think it’s more difficult when you don’t have that. We realised together, you don’t need anyone to create theatre except a group of actors, actors are the only indispensable part of this entire industry and
it scares people to hear that. CO: Ash said from the start, find collaborators. I thought, why not share that responsibility with the actors? I don’t like the title director for myself; the actors we’ve selected are incredibly strong and I don’t see the role of director as someone who tells actors to stand here and do this, do that; but to facilitate. I think I’m just really stubborn. A lot of people said you can’t do this, it’s too much work for one person so I had to do it. That’s the funny thing; when I look back I think, what was stopping me? So manned with little more than each other and a shared inspiration, they embarked upon the project you’ll be watching tonight: 7th Magpies Julius Caesar.
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