David Gardener as Brutus

Brave return to Stage for Brutus

Julius Caesar
Hampstead Parish Church
Tom Foot

I FIRST met David Gardner puffing enthusiastically on a cigar outside Hampstead Parish Church one stormy night in July last year.
The Hampstead Players were putting the finishing touches to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a production that was cancelled after Gardner was critically injured days later in the terrorist attacks.
Outside the church he talked passionately about playing Brutus and a recent Barbican production that had given rise to the performance. We sheltered from the midsummer thunderstorm unaware of what that “strange impatience of the heavens” had in store for him.
Gardner would soon be reciting his lines to fellow commuters in the depths of Edgware Road underground station, trying to bring calm amid the wound-gaping bodies and din of that horrid confusion.
After losing a leg and his spleen, Gardner made an emotional return to the stage this weekend as Brutus on the first anniversary of July 7. His wife Angela played Brutus’s wife Portia.
The parallels and ironies were overwhelming. Caesar’s defiance, “I shall not stay at home today in fear,” and Cassius’s call “to speak, strike, redress” chimed of Londoners’ reaction to the attacks.
But the production stood up on its own merits, rising above the wretched individual history underpinning it.
Shakespeare ensured his play had a contemporary edge when first performed in 1601 by keeping his players in 17th-century dress.
Instead he made his history plays relevant to his audience by bringing them crashing into his present.
The Hampstead Players – who celebrate their 30th anniversary this year – have done the same in a modern dress am-dram production that bordered on the professional.
The young Ben Horslen – who recently co-directed Richard III in St Stephen’s Church – coped well with the key “lend me your ears” speech. He avoided any pompous declamation, rightly trouncing Brutus’s futile effort. Gardner looked genuinely fraught while reconciling principles in his orchard.
Bill Risebero skulked about the gilded church stage embodying “the lean and hungry look” of the scheming Caius Cassius to great effect.
A shame, then, that the run was only three days. But as Gardner later commented of the obstacles facing amateur productions, “life tends to get in the way.”

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