White Suits for a Republic: On Blood, Rhetoric, and the Strange Afterlife of Julius Caesar.

Some plays seem to arrive each century with a different expression, like a portrait that alters subtly depending on the light. Julius Caesar is one of those works. It is ostensibly a drama about a murder in 44 BCE, yet every staging quietly reveals more about the political anxieties of the era watching it.

In the new production by Bell Shakespeare at the Sydney Opera House, directed by Peter Evans, the play unfolds less like a historical tragedy and more like an anatomy of political persuasion. What interests Evans is not the assassination itself, but the machinery that makes such an act imaginable.

The first impression is visual - a parliament of immaculate men and women in cream-white suits. Costume designer Simone Romaniuk dresses Rome not in classical robes but in tailoring that feels faintly diplomatic: Double-breasted jackets, polished shoes, silhouettes that might just as easily appear in a European legislature or a late-night political talk show.

It is an elegant solution to Shakespeare’s timelessness. Rome becomes less an archaeological site than a system of governance - recognisable, contemporary, faintly brittle.

Yet white is a dangerous colour in political theatre.

Blood does not negotiate with linen.

The trouble with revolutions is that they always begin so elegantly.

Evans resolves the problem with a gesture that is as provocative as it is practical. As the conspirators encircle Caesar and the knives begin to rise, the stage cuts abruptly to black. The assassination occurs somewhere beyond the audience’s gaze. When the curtain rises again after the interval, the senators stand before us drenched in blood, their once-pristine suits transformed into something resembling forensic evidence.

It is a bold choice, and perhaps the production’s most debated one. Shakespeare’s assassination scene has always functioned as a kind of ritual climax - the moment when rhetoric collapses into violence. To obscure the act risks deflating the play’s visceral centre.

Yet the absence also produces an odd philosophical echo. We already know Caesar will die. History has spoiled the ending. By refusing to stage the murder directly, Evans shifts our attention toward the consequences rather than the spectacle.

In other words, the real drama begins after the blood has dried.

The set - also designed by Evans - reinforces this sense of political aftermath. Towering walls in oxidised red rise behind the actors like monumental rust stains. They evoke Roman architecture, certainly, but also something more modern: the bureaucratic severity of post-Soviet government buildings, the faintly oppressive geometry of military headquarters.

After the interval, the stage fills with the movable clutter of a field command centre.

Barricades, stairways, and portable structures slide across the floor like logistical fragments of a war that has already begun.

Rome has become a temporary government.

Lighting designer Amelia Lever-Davidson accentuates the mood with harsh horizontal beams that cut across the vertical walls, while composer and sound designer Madeleine Picard introduces a sonic landscape that begins with the swagger of rock music before dissolving into a low mechanical hum.

The republic, it seems, has entered its industrial phase.

At the centre of the moral labyrinth stands Brutus, played with remarkable intelligence by Brigid Zengeni. Shakespeare’s Brutus is one of the theatre’s great paradoxes: A conspirator who murders for the sake of virtue. Zengeni approaches the role not as a heroic republican but as a person trapped inside the logic of political philosophy.

Her soliloquies unfold with the careful pacing of someone assembling an argument in real time. Brutus does not want to kill Caesar. She persuades herself that the republic requires it.

Watching the reasoning unfold, one is reminded of the novelist Joseph Conrad, whose political fiction repeatedly explored the strange moral arithmetic of revolutionary violence. In Conrad’s world, the most terrifying conspirators are not zealots but thoughtful individuals who have convinced themselves that history demands unpleasant acts.

Leon Ford’s Cassius provides the necessary counterweight. If Brutus is philosophy, Cassius is psychology. Ford plays him with the alert restlessness of a man who has spent too long observing the theatre of power from the wings. His famous speech describing Caesar as a “Colossus” striding across the world arrives not merely as rhetoric but as diagnosis.

Cassius understands something the others do not: power is a performance.

Septimus Caton’s Caesar, meanwhile, leans decisively into pomposity. Caton portrays the leader as a man intoxicated by his own symbolic weight - an individual who mistakes applause for inevitability. The choice is unexpectedly effective. By making Caesar faintly ridiculous, the production complicates the moral calculus of the conspiracy. The audience may recognise his arrogance, yet the brutality of the response remains impossible to justify.

Which brings us to Mark Antony.

If Shakespeare were writing today, Antony would likely host a political podcast.

Mark Leonard Winter begins the role almost as comic relief: A tracksuit-wearing hanger-on, the sort of associate who appears at rallies but rarely speaks. Yet by the time he reaches the famous funeral oration, the character has mutated into something altogether more dangerous.

Winter performs the speech like a virtuoso improvisation. Sometimes he addresses the audience directly; sometimes he amplifies his voice through a handheld microphone, transforming the Roman forum into something resembling a political rally or televised press conference.

At one extraordinary moment he thrusts the microphone toward Caesar’s wounds, as though hoping the dead body might contribute to the broadcast.

The image is grotesque, theatrical, and oddly precise.

It captures something about the contemporary media environment that Shakespeare could not have predicted but would likely have understood instinctively: the transformation of political grief into spectacle.

The historian Timothy Snyder has written about the fragility of democratic institutions when rhetoric begins to outpace truth. Watching Winter’s Antony manipulate the crowd - modulating outrage, sympathy, and irony with near-musical precision - one sees exactly how such transformations occur.

The speech does not argue. It orchestrates.

For several minutes the audience becomes the Roman mob, swaying under the rhythm of carefully deployed phrases. Shakespeare’s genius lies in recognising that political power rarely depends on force alone. It depends on narrative.

Not every element of the production achieves the same clarity. Certain projected captions announcing upcoming events feel unnecessarily literal, as though the play momentarily loses faith in its own dramatic inevitability. And some scenes surrounding the assassination drift slightly, as if the production itself were impatient to arrive at Antony’s rhetorical fireworks.

Yet the broader architecture remains compelling.

Evans’ Julius Caesar is ultimately less concerned with the murder of a leader than with the philosophical wreckage that follows it. The conspirators imagine they are restoring balance to the republic. Instead they trigger a sequence of events that dismantles the very system they sought to protect.

The Roman historian Tacitus once wrote that the secret of empire is to create the appearance of restoring freedom while quietly consolidating power. Shakespeare understood this paradox centuries earlier.

By the end of the play, Caesar is long dead, yet the republic he threatened has already dissolved into civil war. The conspirators who believed themselves patriots discover they have merely accelerated Rome’s transformation into empire.

Which leaves the audience with a question that has haunted the play for four hundred years.

Is it possible to commit murder in the name of principle and remain morally intact?

Shakespeare never answers.

He simply stages the argument - in white suits, beneath rust-coloured walls, while the language of liberty slowly acquires the texture of blood.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Brett Boardman.