Like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, Nicholas Hytner is a “shrewd contriver”. He has created a promenade, modern-dress production of this suddenly fashionable Roman play that is both viscerally exciting and intellectually subtle. I was reminded of the Henry V that opened Hytner’s tenure at the National Theatre in that, without distorting the text, he makes the play politically urgent.



Crowd-pleaser … David Calder as Caesar. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Hytner starts the evening with a pounding rock concert staged as part of a pro-Caesar rally: a reminder that even putative dictators can be populists. David Calder’s Caesar, far from seeming a fascist monster whose overthrow we automatically cheer, emerges as a charismatic crowd-pleaser whose first instinct is to hurl his baseball cap into the audience. Only gradually do we see that this flesh-pressing figure is a dangerous autocrat: enthroned on a scarlet dais in the Capitol, he chillingly announces: “I could be well moved, if I were as you.” It is always a good sign when Caesar is at the heart of a revival, and Hytner taps into our awareness of the threat posed by soundbite-seeking demagogues.

Hytner’s approach also throws into sharp relief the divisions among the conspirators. Ben Whishaw plays Brutus excellently as the archetypal bookish intellectual stronger on revolutionary theory than practice; he pores over political volumes on the eve of the assassination and arrogantly overrides every one of his co-conspirators’ proposals. The key moment comes in the Forum when a plebeian says of Brutus “Let him be Caesar”: a remark that Whishaw greets with the appalled horror of a man who has totally failed to communicate his detestation of dictators.

Michelle Fairley is not the first female Cassius (Zoë Waites played the role in last year’s Sheffield Crucible production), but she brings to the part exactly the right intensity, passion and political pragmatism. You even wonder if Brutus, who marginalises his wife and talks patronisingly of “the melting spirits of women”, contradicts her arguments precisely because of her gender.

Passion and pragmatism … Michelle Fairley as Cassius. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

If the conspirators come across as a rancorous elite out of touch with popular sentiment, David Morrissey’s Mark Antony emerges as the perfect embodiment of the bumptious opportunist who will promise anything to get public support. Having used Caesar’s will as a vote-catcher, he instantly reneges on his campaign promises.

While mining the text for modern parallels, Hytner stages the play with real visual flair. Standing spectators are shunted around the arena like the manipulated Roman mob. Bunny Christie has cleverly solved the design problem by creating ramps and platforms that rise from the floor to elevate the actors. There is also a genuine sense of anarchy to the post-assassination turmoil. Kate Waters as fight director, Bruno Poet on lighting design and Paul Arditti as sound designer turn the ensuing civil war into an affair of sense-bombarding horror.

This is not the only way to approach Julius Caesar. Angus Jackson’s underrated RSC production last summer, although set in the world of togas, brought out no less clearly the impotent panic of the conspirators in the wake of Caesar’s murder. But the great virtue of Hytner’s production is that it makes exciting use of the Bridge’s spatial flexibility and underscores the relevance of a play that shows political revolution is too serious a business to be left to a self-regarding elite out of touch with the popular will.