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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

First Encounters: Julius Caesar review – so thrilling it kept a hall full of teens in pin-drop silence

In a Julius Caesar production, a woman screams while raising a knife over another woman in a headlock
Changes the air in the room … Carolina Valdés as Casca and Jackie Clune as Julius Caesar. Photograph: Helen Maybanks

The auditorium is stripped bare – a repurposed hall whose ascending seating resembles an amphitheatre but with plastic chairs. This show could pass for a school production, in appearance, if you didn’t know better. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar, which originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012, is now touring secondary schools.

We are in Peterborough, but also in Rome and in a women’s prison: Shakespeare is framed within an incarceration story, which occasionally impinges on it with interruptions from guards and prison protocols.

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