Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of London Theatre Company's JULIUS CAESAR?

Nicholas Hytner's production of Julius Caesar, the London Theatre Company's second production at the Bridge Theatre, runs from 20 January to 15 April 2018, with opening night on Tuesday 30 January 2018. Designs are by Bunny Christie, with costumes by Christina Cunningham, music by Nick Powell, lighting by Bruno Poet and sound by Paul Arditti.

Caesar returns in triumph to Rome and the people pour out of their homes to celebrate. Alarmed by the autocrat's popularity, the educated élite conspire to bring him down. After his assassination, civil war erupts on the streets of the capital.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Michael Billington, The Guardian: While mining the text for modern parallels, Hytner stages the play with real visual flair. Standing spectators are shunted around the arena like the manipulated Roman mob. Bunny Christie has cleverly solved the design problem by creating ramps and platforms that rise from the floor to elevate the actors. There is also a genuine sense of anarchy to the post-assassination turmoil. Kate Waters as fight director, Bruno Poet on lighting design and Paul Arditti as sound designer turn the ensuing civil war into an affair of sense-bombarding horror.

Ann Treneman, The Times: Nicholas Hytner directs a populist production of a play about populism. It's two hours straight through, which adds to the intensity. Everything in the staging is larger than life: the weather is apocalyptic, the military battles deafening, the politics diabolical. Mark Antony finds his voice at the funeral with a speech that is almost hypnotically powerful. It also feels very macho: by the end everyone is wearing camouflage and rushing around a barbed wire war game.

There is nothing subtle or sophisticated here. It's an onslaught - on the emotions, the senses, the eardrums. I am quite certain someone has studied recent election rally footage. "Do This!" as the placard said. And then they did.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Hytner's concept is to hint at contemporary relevance without ever laying it on with a trowel. This Julius Caesar is both topical and universal. This yields particular dividends in the playing of Ben Whishaw's Brutus, a charismatic but fatally flawed liberal thinker, forever stroking his beard and eyebrows, bespectacled and blinded by his own cleverness to the fact that every decision he makes is wrong.

The contrast between his arrogant speech to the crowd after Caesar's murder - a shooting not a stabbing - when he assumes that the crowd will automatically understand that he did it for the good of the country, and Mark Antony's direct appeal to the emotions of his "friends, Romans, countrymen" is beautifully managed. Remain and leave positions in the Brexit referendum spring unbidden to mind.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: While there are moments that acquire a decidedly "Donald"-esque resonance, especially the way Caesar's antagonism towards Cassius and disregard for a last-minute warning seem to stem from knee-jerk male chauvinism - Hytner doesn't box the show in. The accents are English, and when the action spirals into civil war the argument broadens, the minutely realised mayhem and bloody horror of conflict evoking the brutal unravelling of the Arab Spring revolutions and making the universal point that the road to hell may be paved with decent, anti-autocratic intentions.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: Hytner doesn't labour the lecturing in a production that for the most part unfolds like a chic, glossy spy thriller, contrasting Caesar's brash rule with the irresistible gathering momentum of the conspiracy against him, headed by the reluctant Brutus and Michelle Fairley's flinty Cassius. And it's all tremendously gripping. Or at least it was standing up - I can't speak for how it looks from the seats - as we're hustled around Bunny Christie's spare, flexible set by 'security'.

Truth be told, the thrillerish aesthetic slightly founders in the final half hour, when the dogs of war are let slip and the conspirators enter a slightly underwhelming all-out confrontation with Mark Antony. But this isn't uncommon in productions of this play, and Hytner keeps it all barrelling along at such a pace that you barely notice a drop-off as it whizzes by with all the sickening lurch of twenty-first century politics.

Natasha Tripney, The Stage: This isn't Hytner's subtlest work as a director of Shakespeare, but nor is it intended to be. Far more than Young Marx, it really shows what the Bridge Theatre's auditorium can do. Though that said, for all its flash, there are moments that don't quite click, moments that feel like they belong in a more conventionally staged production.

None of this dampens the fact that this remains a potent essay on the performance of politics and what it is to be popular, an exploration of what people think they want from a leader and the leader they end up getting.

Mark Shenton, London Theatre: The production comes laden with star power: there's serious charisma here to show why this clash of egos and intentions is so inevitable. Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey, as Brutus and Antony respectively, are both superb as men on opposite sides of Caesar, the one bringing him down, the other building up his legacy as he avenges his death. David Calder makes a striking impression as a ruler who needs to be brought down.

There's also powerful work from Michelle Fairley and Adjoa Andoh as Cassius and Casca, usually roles played by men but here making perfect sense as women.

Hytner's triumph is an accessible, thoughtful and involving production.

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