Between the execution of something terrifying and the first movement, the interval is like a ghost or a horrible dream.
Brutus, Act II, scene 1

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a play about people who make mistakes, costly mistakes, for themselves and for their country. No one in this play escapes misinterpretations, wrong decisions and miscalculations. Being ruled by Caesar means total submission to a ruthless autocrat, capable of the worst punishments. However, being ruled by the men who kill him means total submission to the wills of corrupt and self-centered men, whose slogan “freedom” refers exclusively to their own freedom of action and the absence of consequences for their actions. Immediately after they assassinate Caesar, Cassius says: “For how many centuries will this heroic scene of ours be played out, in countries yet unborn and languages yet unknown.”

This self-referential play takes us back to the assassinations that have marked our political history: Marat, Lincoln, Trotsky, Mahatma and Indira Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Anwar Al Sadat, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, among many others. We still needlessly sacrifice people on the altar of ideologies. Time and time again, men of slogans and ambition seduce and delude millions of people with hypocritical rhetoric. Time and time again, violence begets more violence.

Cyclically, we are led to believe that the end justifies the means. Perhaps that’s why this play seems so radically ironic and why it’s so difficult for me to take its characters seriously: we see energies being turned against themselves, falls directly related to aspirations and limitations emphasized by potentialities.

In The Courage of Truth, Michel Foucault looks at the importance of public speaking and discusses parresia, which refers to the courage to tell the truth, to speak frankly, to expose everything. However, in this play, speaking is not simply a way of making the character visible.

Speech is the very inner action of the characters, their conflicts and their choices. Faced with this, the reader/viewer is forced to weave their own narrative, not only by what is said in public, but above all by what is done in private.

It was these possibilities that drew me to this text: that of a theater empty of actors, that of the split in the way in which what is public and what is private is accessed, that of the exposure of what is done by some while what is done by others happens.

what is done by some while what is said by others happens, oscillating between the relevance of what happens on stage and what happens backstage. A direct link is thus drawn between the real and the fictional, the actor and the character, politics and culture.

The appropriation of the theater backstage is also a way of talking about ourselves using the confrontation with the other, an attempt to find the possible resources of approximation and distancing between the parties.

We need – I need – time to make sense of the world and the problem with time is always the apparent lack of it. And, perhaps because of this, we turn the complexity of the world into a binary lust.

Hegel said that history repeats itself, Marx added that it repeats itself the first time as a tragedy and the second time as a farce, and I realize that, at this point, it’s already a meme. There is more death in history than there is flesh on the body.

It may learn, it may win, it may lose.