Julius Caesar

With a few brief exceptions, Rome's proud boast was that it had been a republic for several hundred years. (Of course not a perfect one; it had always allowed the enslavement of other tribes captured in war!) But the familiar internal strains of Left and Right - the 'Plebeians' versus the wealthy 'Patrician' families - had always been there. They came to a head when 'the right man' came along: Caesar, a deeply ambitious Roman general, the darling of his troops and of the Roman populace who had benefited from the spoils of his foreign conquests. It suited him well to be seen in that light, even though he himself was descended from one of Rome's oldest and wealthiest Patrician families, the Claudian line. Does this seem familiar...?

In 44 BCE things came to a head. Though the Senate declared him 'Dictator For Life' after his last victory, that title does not have the meaning we would understand today. It gave him considerable administrative powers but still far from absolute, and was more of an honorific than a reality. He wanted the reality, seeing the Senate as a slow cumbersome inconvenience - as 'government by consent' often appears to be. As a general he was accustomed to being obeyed without question, and in his mind Rome owed him more than empty titles.Thus began the events that would shake the Roman state to its foundations, and shape the future of the whole Mediterranean world including all of Europe for the next 500 years. Indeed the fallout from those events lasts even to the present day. What may seem like the petty internal squabbling of one Italian city-state was in fact one of the most critical 'hinge points' in all recorded history!

Shakespeare was no dry dusty historian. This, one of his best-known plays, pins down the human motives, the driving passions of the chief actors in this world-changing drama - and as the centuries pass, it never fails to be relevant to audiences. Now is no exception to that. 'Who shall be master....?' Like many directors before her, Emily Bowles has re-imagined the setting to provide a context more familiar to a modern audience, but the story's fast-moving pace, power to excite and to move us remain undiminished.