It could be immensely cheeky of the Royal Shakespeare Company to have scheduled the press night of their latest World Shakespeare Festival flagship production immediately following the Diamond Jubilee bank holiday. A play written towards the end of another Queen Elizabeth’s long reign, pondering the succession crisis through a classical Roman prism, observing that monarchical and republican ambitions can ultimately seem equally hollow to the observer… It could easily pass for some satire keen and critical. In the event there is no such edge, although I think there are some unintentional resonances.
    
RSC artistic director designate Gregory Doran has set his production (which moves on shortly to Newcastle upon Tyne and then London before touring in the autumn) in contemporary Africa. It opens on Michael Vale’s crumbling stepped concrete set, suggestive of a neglected public space or stadium, with a band playing high-life music to a crowd anticipating the arrival of Caesar; the tribunes attempt to break up the gathering with sjamboks. When Jeffery Kissoon’s Julius enters, he is white-suited and slick-haired, every inch the smiling dictator (which was indeed Caesar’s title). Then, in this condensed version (140 minutes, no interval), the focus shifts to Cyril Nri’s Cassius and Paterson Joseph’s Brutus, who later find themselves opposed by a Mark Antony (Ray Fearon) whose funeral oration so overtly manipulates the crowd that he ends by leading them in a chant of [what sounds like] “Caesar ndele!” The final civil war phase of the play skims by in half an hour or so, with little martial atmosphere but a vague sense of a jumble of armies and militias in the picture.
    
The principal cast all give demonstrative performances throughout, though I do not know how much is a considered portrait of African culture and how much, conversely, is a by-product of attempts to make it more accessible to a European audience, multiculturalism notwithstanding. In fact, herein lies a danger that this kind of interpretation, whilst on a conscious level celebrating Shakespeare’s universality, may inadvertently point up the contrast between host and subject cultures. Especially at a time of heritage-centred celebration like this, it may evoke complacent – not to say racist - self-congratulation that we ourselves are not prone to such instability and conflict. As the saying has it, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.

Written for the Financial Times.