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.
Harriet Walter reprises her role as Brutus; Jackie Clune returns as Julius Caesar. Leah Harvey, who played the soothsayer in the 2016 revival, now owns the role of an earnest yet calculatingly vengeful Mark Anthony.
The institutional minimalism of Bunny Christie’s set design is in keeping with Lloyd’s setup of a drama society in a prison putting on the play before us, the actors dressed in similar grey, state-issue outfits. Small TV screens variously flash CCTV surveillance footage from the prison and summaries of forthcoming scenes from the play in blaring letters.
The history play’s themes of justice, power, populism and violence begetting violence have plenty of resonance today. Still, it is a tall order to hold the attentions of a hall full of school pupils with Shakespearean verse and there is shuffling, giggling and nudging among them in the opening scenes. But from the moment Caesar is stabbed by Brutus’s conspirators (Clune makes this graphic, although it remains bloodless) the air in the room changes.
The production holds us all captive with its propulsive action and carefully crafted lo-fi, modern elements that never simplify or reduce. There are red rubber gloves for bloodied hands, freeze-frames, fine atmospheric lighting design by Zeynep Kepekli with sudden blackouts, along with electronic music building adrenaline for the bloodlust of war (from Stormzy’s Big for Your Boots to a Fatboy Slim remix of Renegade Master and last year’s hit Partii). The violence, in this setting, could just as well be about youth gang culture, with its cycle of grudges and revenge.
Walter, elegantly androgynous, again makes a clear-eyed and upstanding idealist in Brutus, motivated to preserve the city’s republican freedoms (“Not that I loved Caesar less but I loved Rome more”). Clune is fantastically strutting in leather coat. Shakespeare’s women are strong, too, key in foreseeing danger: Portia (Shalisha James-Davis) demanding husband Brutus to divulge his secrets while Calpurnia (Kosar Ali) appears as imperious as her husband, Caesar, accompanied by a childlike soothsayer (Siân Stephens) who runs creepy circles around her on a tricycle.
As the blood rises, turntables are wheeled out as if part of the war machine, with soldiers pumped up for the fight. Executions are carried out with hoods and plastic guns, accompanied by the sound of real shots. It has the feel of a history play gone through a Tarantino wringer, yet still faithful to its original spirit.
By the time Brutus is overcome, there is pin-drop silence among the audience, every ear pricked. It is Julius Caesar brought excitingly alive (even the promo video is a thrill), and as a first encounter with Shakespeare, or with theatre itself, it is hard to beat.
• The schools tour runs until 23 October. Then at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5-28 November
