Julius Caesar review, Bridge Theatre

Hold on to your hats for a most exciting and innovative Julius Caesar. The stall seats in London's new Bridge Theatre have been removed, revealing a floor that can rise and fall in sections and gradations to create a moving, central, set, around which a promenade audience doubles as the Roman hordes while a hard-working, fast-moving, ensemble reenacts Caesar's bloody end.

From the opening - a rock band starts fifteen minutes before the performance, the sound bouncing off the walls - we are moving to the beat of Nicholas Hytner's production. Insurrection is in the air. Cast and floor managers wave placards and demand change. When Caesar's beloved friend, Brutus - Ben Whishaw looking like a young Trotsky - begins the arguments in favour of assassinating the emperor, we're all with him. Even more so when David Calder's slow-moving, old-gittish, Caesar hoves into view. Of course this needs to be done!

The concern and tension that the plotters normally convey is replaced in this constantly morphing version, with speed and urgency. We're engaging with the actions more than the emotions. Thus when the plotters kill Caesar, the horror of what they have done is dulled. Particularly so because the intimacy and betrayal required to approach a divine leader and drive blades through his mortal flesh is replaced here by Brutus and Co standing some distance away and firing guns. When, at Julius Caesar's funeral, Mark Antony (David Morrissey, currently representing Rome on our screens in Brittainia) gives his normally powerful peroration - Friends, Romans, countrymen - it is lost in the sound and fury. Perhaps it is more realistic for that?

In conclusion: The underlying point about modern dictators passed me by but the mixed casting is terrific.  Michelle Fairley is stunning as Cassius. There are more coherent and moving interpretations of Julius Caesar, but few as inventive. There is as much pleasure from Bunny Christie's set and the young, promenade, audience responding to it, as the action itself.


The Bridge Theatre, Potters Fields, London SE1 2SG.   Run ends 15 April

Picture by Manuel Harlan, Bridge Theatre gallery