This is no glamorous dressing room: no telegrams, fizz or floral tributes. Instead, there’s an ailing pot plant and a bucket to catch the drips. It’s the understudies’ lair in a West End production of Julius Caesar. Some big name plays Caesar (consensus is he’s a bit of a dick), while our guys cover the chief assassins. They don’t even get their own names here – just Understudy Brutus and Understudy Cassius.
Night after night they skulk, waiting for the call that never comes, the show Tannoy an implacable reminder of the parade passing them by. For the show’s 100th performance, they celebrate with party hats, microwave popcorn and a run-through of the play they may never deliver for real.
Why should only stars get to shine? The production itself, huff the understudies, isn’t up to much. They might save it, if they only had the chance. They quietly wish that someone would really break a leg – what if they’re not just killing time but, possibly, also one of the leads?
Actor Adam Goodbody founded Buzz Studios in memory of his aunt Buzz, pioneering director of “studio Shakespeare”, who died 50 years ago. In the company’s debut show, his Understudy Cassius is over-prepared, line-sharp; John Chisham’s slouching colleague spikes his tea with whisky. They zip through the script with varying degrees of intensity, paraphrase and chatty commentary.
The pair, who devised the play with director Júlia Levai, smartly identify how comradeship turns competitive in Shakespeare – the assassination marks the moment when Brutus and Cassius are closest and yet when their bond starts to shred. In Levai’s inventive production, the drab room (design by Tomás Palmer) cracks open to phantasms and hideous dreams, and the captioning goes wild.
Although bold in form, Petty Men feels like a narrow reading of the play, circling around personal ambition rather than political conviction. Julius Caesar is a play for our No Kings era. Murder to save the state is one thing; but however highly charged the bubble of a theatre production seems, it can’t matter as much as the fate of actual Rome.
At Arcola theatre, London, until 20 December
