Anna Burnside reviews a very funny production with a ‘deeply satisfying, if horrific, ending’.
As a riot unfolds on the streets of Dublin, three actors audition for a part in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The director, a dictator disguised in a cardigan, plays down the external threat and urges them to trust his process.
This process involves rotating the sparky white woman, black man and gauche white guy around the different parts, changing up their performance styles. It becomes clear that his process does not involve seeing past each one’s identity as he asks Marlene to play Portia as a nagging wife, then as a seductress.
With Sidney, the black actor, he can’t see beyond violence and racial stereotypes. He asks him to play one part as a “straight off the boat Nigerian” and claims to be using the Meisner Technique when he and Laurence play out one of Brutus’s speeches with their hands tightly round each other’s necks.
If this was not unpleasant enough, during a break the director sacks the musician who has been underscoring the audition. That would be the musician who is part of the open relationship the director has with a woman, the mother of his baby.
Writer and director Joy Nesbitt based Julius Caesar Variety Show on her own experiences as a performer. She uses chunks of Shakespeare’s play about a monster who must be killed for the greater good to serve her own story. At its centre, Ultan Pringle is believably vile as the director: sweaty, self-absorbed, with a great line in fake smiles and self-absorption.
Increasingly disgruntled musician Conrad Jones Brangan heightens every emotion with his plinky keyboard.
The three actors, who hate each other as well as the director, slowly reveal more of themselves as the day wears on. At one delicious point Sidney and Marlene gang up on Laurence, who has recently appeared in a period bonkbuster.
“Getting pegged on Netflix,” they tell him, “is not the work.”
Nesbitt ties it all up in a deeply satisfying, if horrific, ending. It’s hard not to conclude that one of the reasons it’s so funny is because it’s true.
Julius Caesar Variety Show is part of Summerhall’s Arts Festival programme. It performs at 16:45 (60min) in the Red Lecture Theatre space until 31 August 2026 (no performances 17th or 24th). For further details, go to the website.
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