This was so much fun! The National Theatre always produce such engaging and enjoyable, not to mention technically brilliant plays, especially of Shakespeare. This one was absolutely raucous. Totally appropriate for the epic and brutal nature of the play. It starts with a live rock band performing covers of popular hits with David Morrissey and others hyping up the crowd ready for the show. And this wild energy bleeds into the performance and carries it all the way through to the end. It is a fast paced and explosive and dynamic version of Julius Caesar featuring great performances and chops as well as explosive stage effects and sequences. Ben Whishaw is the perfectly torn Brutus. Morrisey an aggressive Marc Anthony.

This production of Julius Caesar has a grunge band, as if it was Seattle in 1990. The text is cut: the shorter length condensed action and made it an entirely different work, not the original source, but merely based on.

It was not a representation of ancient Rome, not that the play is either historically accurate nor authentic, ( no one ever said Et tu...) but the relationships had been changed fundamentally from the play by Shakespeare to something like a contemporary dictatorship in which grunge still rocks.

The problem is that the production is not really the source play. It is full of tricks and distractions and that works for an audience, but it is not the original play. That is not necessarily bad but like the trade descriptions act to describe any product, cereal, or a car, it is not what is advertised. The hardest justification is cutting the text because the text is what someone pays to see and hear hence the cuts have a very large effect.

Nicholas Hytner's contemporary take on ancient Rome's political elite is sparsely set. Props and scenery are largely absent, costumes are in subdued colours, and scene changes are carried out in the dark, quickly and inconspicuously. This serves to focus attention on the text, and the emotions and interaction between characters, characters who look like they could have walked right off a street outside. Hytner isn't very interested in dissecting Roman historical details in this interpretation, but in something more universal - the nature of political leadership, on how the masses can and do perceive politicians, and on how the masses can so easily be manipulated. We start off, before scene one, with a loud, heavy metal band, playing to bopping, beer-drinking audience members standing around the stage. At first this appeared to be a kind of warm-up act, until during the rock music commotion, a man appeared with a track suit top that said "Mark Antony" on the back, and spoke to the crowd. Oh no, we thought, is this noise is part of the play, do we have to put up with this repetitive, blaring electronic throbbing throughout this production? Fortunately, no. However, after our screen went blank shortly afterwards (we were told because of technical problems) we then, in our cinema, landed up in the middle of Act I Scene II, just before Cassius describes pulling a nearly drowning Caesar out of the water. Hence I can't tell you how the warm-up act actually segued into Scene I, the famous Beware the Ides of March scene. But this rock 'n roll prelude set a tone: there were frequent loud electronic sound effects throughout the performance, which tested the abilities of the actors to project their voices and their diction above the noise and rabble. All passed. In fact, all actors navigated the 16th century dialogue with nuance, humour, and received thespian pronunciation. This was even though some of the actors, such as Wendy Kweh, from Singapore, (as Calpurnia) come from a background where learning the fluent speaking of English dialogue from 1599 isn't part of the background culture. What of the characterizations? Hytner took the surprising decision to cast a woman as Cassius, but it worked. Michelle Fairley was outstanding in this role, and projected a truly lean and hungry look, but Adjoa Andoh nearly stole a few scenes from her, with her amusing swagger and mannerisms. David Calder emitted Caesar's arrogance from within a somewhat crumpled lounge suit, and made the man seem much more like one of those talking political figureheads seen on the nightly news. Of course later we see that this is not the whole of the man. David Morrissey was a Mark Antony of a seemingly naive fan-club sort at first, yet who blossoms into one who manipulates a crowd through flawless word magic and innuendo. Ben Whishaw's Brutus was scholarly and measured in approach, but ultimately misguided by his education. The entire interpretation works well as a mirror to our own era, where politicians' personalities play on world stages, civil unrest is bubbling away, the elite try to keep the masses in the dark from unraveling what is really going on, and where there are dark and abrupt political scene changes . Shakespeare tells of a deep state in Rome before Christ. This is the aspect that Hytner chooses to focus on and dress in contemporary clothes.