‘I’m no white man in a toga’: Thalissa Teixeira on having a stab at Brutus

‘We’re telling the story of now’ … Teixeira, the first young black woman to play Brutus for the RSC. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

I arrive in the aftermath of an assassination. Actors are rehearsing the panic following Julius Caesar’s murder. Some stand aghast, while others scamper – and kneeling at their centre, cradling the dead emperor, is Brutus, his former ally who delivered the unkindest cut.

For the first time at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brutus will be a young, Black woman – Thalissa Teixeira. “Hugging Caesar came from an improvisation where I basically rugby-tackled him,” she tells me. “You see these two lizard-like forms writhing around each other, and you’re not quite sure who died.”