By dint of a logistical cock-up, we even got to design the cover. Given the work we do, it seemed only right that  we should try to create "Brand Shakespeare", and to make that brand quite knowing. So since KFC were no longer using this logo, we thought that might be able to borrow it.

You can read more about the project on the 26 website

Or better still, why not go and buy the book. Amazon have some

Our you can always just read the Julius Caesar chapter here. It's in two columns, and it's pretty long, so be patient.

;-) 

Rob Andrews on Julius Caesar 

Act 1: Scene 2: Line 63 

utus: Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me? 

Cassius: Therefore, good Bru…

Stop! Hang on. Whoa. Stop the show. 

Did Brutus just smile there? 

He did. 

He smiled. (He might have even winked. I don’t know, I’m guessing. But it was that kind of smile. The sort of smile that might fit nicely with a wink.) 

A knowing smile!? 

He knows, doesn’t he? He knows exactly what’s coming, and he’s just waiting for it. He’s in on it. Wants the fame— he place in history, wants the adulation, wants to be the one being offered the crowns. Him, not best buddy Caesar. He wants it, and wants it bad. He’s just waiting for Cassius to whip through some anecdotes and fawning, and get on with telling him that he’d “make a pretty good Caesar too, don’t you know,” and then he’ll snatch the opportunity out of Cassius’ hands like a greedy toddler. Oh, line 161 can’t come soon enough for wiley Brutus. 

That is, if I really did see the smile. 

(I could be wrong. And if I did just imagine it? Well, 

then Brutus is an innocent man—Lord Charles to Cassius’ Ray Alan. And if he’s not careful, he’s going to be a silly ass.) So now I need to check—I need to get the facts straight. What to do?

Go back to the book, back to the text, back to the line. 

Quick, quick, before they get to the end of the Lupercal, or I’ll never catch them up. There’ll be a stage direction I’m sure. Let’s look for the bit in italics. “For that which is not in me…for that which is not in me…here we go.” 

What does Bill have to say about this…? 

Nothing. Not a clue. Not a sausage. 

Where is the high-definition here? Where are the twelve camera angles if you press the red button? I want resolution. I want an emoticon. Quill me an emoticon bard boy. Is it a \;-) or a (:-o ? 

I need to know. 

The whole plays turns here—in the hair’s breadth of a gap between the end of Brutus’ line, and the start of Cassius’— and Shakespeare has left us to guess. To imagine. To play onto a single line a lifetime of our own dealings, and to make a snap decision about how Brutus deals with Cassius based on how all our own Cassi have leaned on us in our Brutine moments, and how we have responded. 

Is Brutus a powerful ego-maniac desperate for approval? Is he the unwitting patsy to his devious and manipulative brother-in-law, a bit of a sap and a bit of a coward? Both make sense. Choose your conspiracy theory. Play them both out. They are both valid. (Historians can be found to back you up, whichsoever way you go.) 

This is more than just Shakespearean shenanigans or “is it a girl, is it a boy?” confusion. This is genuine ambiguity. Carefully constructed, like a hall of mirrors. 

In a play that is fundamentally about honesty, there seem to be no right or wrong turnings, and the text alone offers us nothing to suggest which way to go. There are no visual clues. There is no staging advice, no capitalized shouts or italicized emphasis. All the text offers us is potential. 

I have my own favorite play of Italian political duplicity and murder, Dario Fo’s The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. (Fo, like Shakespeare and the good old days of the Daily 197 Mirror, liked to consider the politics of the age and push it back to the masses as enlightening entertainment.) I picked it up at A-Level, when we proto-History Boys had the time to work our way through a library of theater history. Clearly, we all found plays that we were never going to see performed. Well, certainly not in Wakefield, where the only theater seemed to take a season of Duggie Brown in panto for at least nine months of the year. So we read, and imagined. True, reading a play is sort of in the same realm as dancing about architecture, but without the theater it’s all there is and all we had. And reading a play rather than watching it gives one a curious insight. It allows you to see exactly what the playwright wanted you to see, and what he was prepared to leave undefined. 

In Anarchist like any farce, where comings and goings are so crucial, the description of the stage business is gaudy: A desk littered with papers and files, telephone and a card listing extensions, a bench, chairs, filing cabinet, wastepaper bin, and a coat stand on which hang various coats and hats. He looks like the cliché idea of Freud: wild hair, thin spectacles, goatee beard, shabby suit or mac. He sits calmly. He carries about four plastic carrier bags stuffed with god knows what? (He crosses himself). 

Everything is here. Every last detail. Every prop waiting patiently, every exit covered. I like this—I’m a visual person. My mind’s eye is full. I have a very precise plan of the scene. Everything is immutable. Read Arthur Miller—it’s the same. Read Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon, Bernard Shaw. Pages of italicized preamble—the size of a broom, the cut of a dress, the spring in a step. Shakespeare’s lead-in to Julius Caesar, by comparison, looks, well, slapdash: 

Rome. A street.  

What? Is that it? “Rome? A street?” Is that not a bit vague? Rome is, was, after all, a big place. Are we city center, or in the ’burbs? Who’s going where, and how are they doing it? How many windows are there? How many cobbles? Blimey, you’re leaving a lot to the imagination. 

And there, dear reader, is the crux of it. That imagination. That suspension of disbelief. Anarchist’s fourth wall CCTV-picture of a Milanese office is a far bigger deception than the nothingness of a bare floor with a couple of Down Stage pillars and a minstrels’ gallery that Shakespeare’s Globe has made so familiar to us. Make it a Veronan balcony, a Danish battlement, The Rialto, The Forum. The only thing that the Globe is painted to look like is a theater, so make it anywhere you want. There’s nothing to say it aint so. 

Does the completeness of a modern playwright’s vision and the preciseness of their stage direction equal a desire to control? To control the full experience of their theater, gaffer-taping mark lines to every provincial stage so that this vision is played out in perfect replicated detail? And it is a vision too. Read the transcript of The Rose Tattoo and you see Tennessee Williams’ world in three dimensions—from facial expressions, to footfalls to furniture. Read Shakespeare—and it’s an awful thing to do, especially if you read the dense, dark, no-nonsense, no-room-for-marginal-notes Alexander Text—and one sees nothing. There are no (okay, very few) visual clues beyond enters and exeunts. It is a game played out in the intellect—a treatise taking the reader from Oh my God, what shall I do? to Oh my God, what have I done? 

But why leave this ambiguity? Ambiguity leads to confusion. We need some decisions to be made. We need direction, don’t we? Clarity of vision is a good thing, isn’t it? 

If JC’s text alone offers little guidance as to the meaning of the play—unlike Williams et al who offers it all up on a printer’s plate—then it invites evolution and renaissance every time the play is rebuilt with a new cast and a new director. Every interpretation is true, as there is no definitive precedent to say it is false. Split into pre-recorded multi-media sound bites for the TV age? In 2003, as it hap•pens. Gehry-esque cement and post-Communist collapsing statues? Off Broadway around election-time, of course. Gay Julius Caesar? Well, there are an awful lot of men in the cast. 

How do you build a credible picture, a solid viewpoint from an incorporeal text? 

It is, bizarrely, exactly the same question that is posed by es/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript"> // --> those brandingy-corporate-identityish-type people trying to pin down an organiztion and turn it into a brand. Brand typically don’t represent an entire company—there’s just too much to represent, just too many possible interpretations—they represent a facet. The facet through which the light is reflected most brightly. 

I find the idea of individual interpretative honesty— each one as valid as the one before and the one after—fasci•nating, but surely it can’t be true? The light can’t really shine equally in all directions? I am always amused by critics applauding performances full of ambiguity. An ambiguous performance is a dreadful one—it doesn’t service the play (or the brand) at all. A definitive performance of a character distinguished by their abstruseness—well, that is something else entirely. That is a decision. A conscious act. We make a choice between the possible and the plausible. 

I talked to David about it. David is my actor friend. He knows his stuff. I ask him where to start, and when he talks about Shakespeare, he talks about the perils of “disservice.” The text is a constant, he opines, it has its poetry and it has its rhythm. Mess with this—the fundament of the play—and it is not just inconsiderate, it is an injustice. 

He compares it to singing a song off-key, and he should know. David is in Billy Elliott. He’s one of the actors who plays Billy’s dad. I read a blogged review that said that seeing David was a much darker experience than watching the other dads—he’s more drunk, more depressed and more unredeemed by his hoofing kid. But David doesn’t do every performance, so even between the Tuesday night show and the Wednesday matinee, the play is rewritten. I want to know why his real is different? Is it part of the process? 

“I’m not dogmatic,” he says. How so? Well, there is no Strasberg, no Stanislavski, no slavishness to the Method in David’s method. The Method method dictates that everything can be found within, given the time and conditions to look hard enough. David is more eclectic and all embracing. He talks about instinct. About investigation. About seeing shards of the character reflected in lots of different places. Every character the amalgamation of a hundred small discoveries—an attitude here, a piece of life history there. Billy’s dad’s grit is assembled from the blue remembered grit of the Bolton David grew up in. Each of the facets he uses are in their own way not enough to define a rounded figure, but together, they make something new and focused. From that he creates what he believes to be real about a character. Makes an honest decision, one that is right—for him, based on his experience and understanding. He has chosen his facet. He has chosen what to be. 

We come back to Brutus. He may be only toying with Cassius, eking out a compliment, but he nails interpretation brilliantly. 

…the eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things. 

It’s an argument that my design-writer pal Richard and I thrashed out when we were trying to find a metaphor for branding. The purpose of a brand consultant, we proposed, is to be that other thing. To be the director, constructing a credible, purposeful and meaningful vision of a company, a product or a plan. And to do so with only the thing that is known to be true—the script (the business plan, the company history, the P&L, the annual report, the marketing plan, all those PowerPoint slides you thought no one would ever see again, all those people who are going to contribute to making it work). Because that’s all any organization has, and all there is—and everything else is a deception. 

Like David, we find our truth. Make our decision. And then we are steadfast in its interpretation. 

(We concluded, in a frenzy of metaphor extension, that branders and theater directors—so alike in our rimmed tortoiseshell spectacles and black suits [no tie]—even shared the same endgame: to have successfully interpreted the script so that thousands of people cou ld understand it, love it and respond to it, preferably with uncontrolled and excited applause.) 

So now, when you look at how a business displays itself, ask yourself the question—how far have they strayed from the fundament of their script? Is that reflection coming back skewed? Maybe, just like in the communal changing rooms in TopShop, they’re looking a bit taller, a bit thinner and a bit more buff, and that’s okay, so long as the corporate body in the glass isn’t a grotesque. We can all accept the truth a touch super-saturated. The things that no brand can tolerate, however, are ambiguity and disservice. Find your truth. Nail your flag to the wall. Don’t remain open to interpretation. If your company is about multiplicity, then make it absolutely, openly, joyously, definitively so. 

Honesty and self-knowledge are the keys here to success. As any character in a Shakespeare tragedy would attest, if you want to make it through to the end of the play you need to know who you are and to stand up for it. You dither—you die. You lie—you die. You rebrand as “an airline with a global family” at the same time that you out-source all your non-essential jobs…well, you can see my point. 

So, businessmen, take a brander’s advice, and remember Brutus, at precisely the point at which he forgot himself: 

Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me? /;-) 

My thanks to David Bardsley and Richard Clayton for their help with this. You can see Richard on DVD in Les Miserables—The Dream Cast in Concert and read David’s work in The Sunday Times and Design Week. Or it might be the other way round.