ROME- It’s not often that you get the opportunity to watch Julius Caesar in the Eternal City itself and so I jumped at the chance to observe, as a plebeian, the violent struggles of politicians past. The third play from Eternal Lines, Douglas Dean directed an atmospheric, fast-paced production which always reinforced the “rot” in the city of Rome. This was epitomised in the excellent night-time exchange between Casca (played by Jonathan Silvestri) and Cicero (Laurence Belgrave) beneath a stormy sky which set a haunted, panicky tone for the acts which followed.

Rishad Noorani was a complicated Caesar- at once tyrannous and vulnerable- as the first two acts unfolded he became increasingly jittery and suspicious, anticipating the imminent moment of crisis. Throughout his performance, Noorani mined his lines for their proleptic weight, portraying Caesar as an outsider, an ill-fated emblem of an outdated political system.

As well as directing, Douglas Dean played a memorable Cassius who was fixated upon Rome. It is important that, although manipulative and rhetorically skilled, Cassius is not as insidious as Othello’s Iago. Dean deftly handled this, even managing to eke out some comedic moments from Cassius’ early lines and steering the first half of the play away from dry and cerebral discussion. Dean worked wonderfully with James Butterfield, who played a tortured and divided Brutus. The soliloquy during which Brutus decides to assassinate Caesar was one of the highlights of the play, as Butterfield replaced Brutus’ philosophical uncertainty with a more chilling resolution that it “must be by his death”.

The female characters in Shakespeare’s Roman plays are usually swept aside by the dominant male characters, destined to roam “but in the suburbs” of the play’s central action. However, brilliant performances from Francesca Albanese as Caesar’s wife Calphurnia and Fabiana Formica as Portia meant that this production avoided the usual descent into a testosterone fest. Albanese was utterly persuasive in her recital of Calphurnia’s prophetic dream to Caesar. Terror-struck by the visions, her desperate pleas for Caesar to stay away from the Senate added an even greater sense of foreboding.

Fabiana Formica impressively brought the character of Portia in from the side-line, a role that is usually only remembered for a bizarre textual crux- Metellus’ repetition of her eventual suicide. Formica played a doting Portia who, wounding her own leg, was also a martyr. Through Formica’s subtle reading, the symmetry between Portia and Caesar himself became more apparent- the sacrifice of Portia’s flesh mirroring the slaying of the Emperor. Both characters become symbolic victims of the conspirators’ rotten ideologies.

While Julius Caesar is a play about the mechanics of evil, it is also a study of rhetoric. The different speeches delivered by Brutus and Mark Anthony following the death of Caesar must represent two different responses to catastrophe, one in reasoned, stoic prose and the other in persuasive, emotional verse. The crowd of plebeians should be portrayed not as capricious but as susceptible to each orator. This crucial scene came as a disappointment, both speeches were rushed over and neither actor seemed to grasp the real significance of their verse. Al Mariotti overlooked the subversive significance of Antony’s refrain, ‘But Brutus says he was ambitious/ And Brutus is an honourable man.” It was a shame that two of the most stirring and complicated speeches in Shakespeare lacked the “stern stuff” of which Antony speaks.

However, the play continued to impress in other ways. Douglas Dean masterfully identified the elegiac tone within the acts following Caesar’s assassination, as the death of the Emperor also marked the extinction of their fraternal bond. Butterfield and Dean carefully unpicked the intimacy of the Brutus and Cassius’- their spiteful squabbles in the quarrel scene brought their corrupt motives to light.

The battle scenes which concluded the play were slick and well choreographed. Despite the suicides of the conspirators, Al Mariotti and Laurence Belgrave avoided performing Mark Antony and Octavius as redeemers or heroes. Instead, there was a bristling friction between each actor, ushering in a fragile start to the triumvirate era.

Julius Caesar begins in turbulence and ends with upheaval, and this production impressed by refraining from concluding with the suggestion that political order has triumphed over chaos. I eagerly await the day that Eternal Lines perform Shakespeare’s next instalment, Antony and Cleopatra.