"We love difficulty," actor Elisa Jones says.
Josiah Morgan agrees. They first met working together on a difficult show, Radiant Vermin, and wanted to do something similar again but just did not know what.
They forwarded plays backwards and forwards but struggled to find something to build on what they had done before.
"Nothing seemed to quite fit."
Then they came to the "really crazy idea" of looking at plays that could not be done by two people like William Shakespeare’s large-cast plays such as Julius Caesar which tells the story of Brutus joining a conspiracy led by Cassius to assassinate Julius Caesar, to prevent him becoming a tyrant.
"We read it through a couple of times asking ourselves the question ‘are we being ridiculous?’
"And the answer might be yes, but ridiculous in a really cool way," Jones says.
"And we were like, ‘you know what? We may be crazy, but we think we can do this’."
"The actual divvying up of the roles was interesting. That came through reading the script multiple times. And they divided quite counter-intuitively. I play Brutus and Cassius, and Elisa plays everyone else," Morgan says.
"And when you say that on paper, it sounds absolutely insane."
People familiar with the play find the concept "quite wild" because so much of the engine of the play is driven by Brutus and Cassius as the two co-leads.
"But what’s interesting is that those two characters are two sides of the same coin. And the other characters are all part of a much more expansive, complicated kind of world."
They discovered by splitting the script that way it was "more or less a 50% split" in dialogue and work for each of them.
"Whereas any other split of characters, even if it may have made more intuitive dramaturgical sense, was really unbalanced.
"But what we found as soon as we were rehearsing the play like this was that Brutus and Cassius being played by the same person opens up heaps of opportunities for what to do with those two characters, because they can never be in the same room together."
That stood for the famous scenes such as Mark Antony’s speech after Caesar’s funeral or Brutus and Cassius having an argument — there could only be one character on stage.
"And that eliminates the problem that we sometimes have in large-cast Shakespeares where you’re watching 30 actors try and react to 25 minutes of monologuing, and it just gets reduced. And then we mimic that same sense of division through the audience set-up as well."
However, for Jones, it means juggling seven characters in her head.
"Probably the biggest initial challenge was obviously differentiating between those, both for myself as an actor, like who am I going into? Who am I replying to? How am I replying?
"But also making sure that was translating well enough that the audience wasn’t going to be confused, that they were coming right along with me. And if I’m switching between characters on stage, I’m not leaving anyone behind."
Morgan was impressed by Jones’ ability to successfully do that as he struggled to make the opposing characters of Brutus and Cassius real.
"I didn’t want to accidentally caricature either of them by pushing them too far into opposition."
"You wake up in the morning, saying your lines before getting out of bed — you’re dreaming it. It’s kind of a nightmarish amount of work, frankly."
There are no costume changes to rely on or major set changes — character changes are all done by voice, body language and position on stage.
"It’s always fun when you, on stage one night, turn your blocking around and find yourself facing a different way to introduce someone," Jones says.
There is also the confusion of having to react to a character you just played.
"I have to remember where they were standing and then I have to come back to where they were in the same pose or similar, to keep that impression for the audience as well.
"It has to be second nature so that you can focus on everything else."
Added to the character work, is the physical drama of fight scenes making it quite the marathon for the pair who performed seven shows in its premier Christchurch season and plan six in Dunedin, including three solely for high school students.
"It’s a physically demanding show as well as an intellectually acting demanding show," Morgan, who works in the arts full-time as an actor, writer, dancer and critic, says.
While it’s a challenge for Morgan and Jones, both of whom did not get into Shakespeare until after they left school and performed it, they hoped the audience did not feel the same way.
"Part of the dream is that it’s really difficult for us and for the audience, it’s just easy. For the audience, they go along and they’re like, I’m watching a really gripping show and I’m forgetting that I’m watching two people do this. But it’s also interesting that it’s difficult."
"It is designed to be entertaining and keep you really engaged and we lean into the fact that there’s only two of us, but we also try and make you forget there’s only two of us," Morgan says.
It meant the anticipation running up to getting the play on stage was immense.
"You can have all the good vibes in a rehearsal room for days but it doesn’t matter until you put it in front of people. Even from the first shows, we were getting really good feedback in the moment, just from the energy from the audience, the participation from the audience.
"From that first show, we were exhausted, but really excited for the rest of the season."
The worries they had about the difficulty and how just two actors might be demanding for audiences turned out not to be the case, Morgan says.
"I think that I had a sense maybe in the rehearsal room that we were making something slightly weirder than we ended up with."
It paid off when the rest of the season sold out. And even better, they were not just getting the usual Shakespeare fans.
"We were getting people that told us they didn’t normally come to see theatre. That was the moment we decided to tour it.
"We felt it was something that people had responded to strongly, otherwise we would have left it in Christchurch."
The reaction from schools and students who attended the play also meant they were keen to perform the show directly to school audiences in Dunedin as the play covered many areas in the drama curriculum.
So, did the play manage to meet their difficulty goal and surpass Radiant Vermin, the two-character play they last performed in together?
"What was at the time the most complex juggling of dialogue that I’ve ever done ... in part, like, that show is designed to throw off its actors for sure. The whole thing is the two characters finishing each other’s sentences and picking up more characters as they play goes on," Jones says.
But they both agree Julius Caesar now superseded that.
"We’ve succeeded in the challenge we set ourselves. Policy of escalation going well."
Julius Caesar is just the work Morgan envisaged when he created his theatre company, JMO Theatrics, to create work for small casts on small budgets.
"I saw a gap in Christchurch and in order to bolster the actual possibility of a professional arts scene in Christchurch, because obviously the national funding picture in the arts is a little bit complicated and there’s a lot of competition so that’s a bit constrained.
"I was interested in finding ways to create shows that could meaningfully give actors work without having to be navigated through the kind of big institutional companies," Morgan says.
"What that meant is we could cast the show with a mix of people who are already seen regularly around New Zealand in very professional contexts, but also people who were just coming through out of high school.
"So, for me, part of the kaupapa of the company is about bridging the relationships between levels of the arts ecosystem in the country and doing that in a way that’s actually financially sustainable."
Theatre is just one of the many things Morgan does, so life is a "constant balance of negotiating and renegotiating time".
"I’m always fiddling with the calendar to make it work. I like all of my work, so it’s easy to take lots on, but actually making an average week ‘work’ is very challenging. On an average week, I’d say I spend about two days doing performance work, one day doing admin and three days doing writing work."
The mix of theatre and poetry is ideal for Morgan, author of four books including Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy which won the Macmillan Brown Writers’ Prize in 2021 and more recently his first book of poetry I’m Still Growing. He is increasingly interested in the blend between the written and the spoken word, and what happens when poetry is brought off the page.
"In 2024, I started the poetry press Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka, which aims to forefront poetry as a performance discipline, where ‘the event’ [the reading, or performance] is the primary marketing tool for the written word. The books, or written products, then become like a ‘gig artefact’, like the album or T-shirt bought at a concert."
He feels having a firm understanding of poetry has helped him bring Shakespeare to life in Julius Caesar.
"Shakespearean text is challenging, even for expert actors, to translate into a way that the audience can comprehend all of."
To see
Dunedin Fringe Festival,
William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,
March 15, 2pm, 7pm, March 16,
7pm, Hanover Hall, Dunedin
