NEW YORK OR LONDON?

the audience absorbed into the proceedings as Roman citizens, and buoyed by outstanding performances by Ben Whishaw as Brutus, Michelle Fairley as Cassius, David Calder as Caesar and David Morrissey as Mark Antony, Hytner’s in-the-round production seizes strikingly on every rabble-rousing opportunity the Bard offers up.

Hytner has turned the flexible, 900-seat performance space into a ring, with spectators seated at floor and two balcony levels and also standing inside the playing area. The standees form the crowds in the crowd scenes, and here’s another example of how a theatre sensibly blurs the lines between concessions and performance: Reminiscent of the Groundlings, members of the audience wander out into the lobby and back into the pit with cups of beer (and maybe that’s why you tend to notice that there are more guys here than usual who you’d think would be more comfortably at a rugby match). As parts of the stage rise on hydraulics from various points inside the ring, they and others around them are encouraged to react, brandish signs, and at one breathtaking moment, unfurl a flag that engulfs them all.

For a play that is so much about having the average person in one’s thrall, the conceits are dazzlingly on point. So are the actors. What they and Hytner trace is the tragic arc of a freedom movement’s demise, how a blow against tyranny becomes too savagely drenched in blood, and how the rabidity of the cause blinds its leaders and allows them to be outmanoeuvred and vanquished. As each of the rebellious Roman senators is wiped out by Antony with barbaric efficiency, you watch the stepby-step snuffing out of a dream. And as the standees are coached by roving “security” men and women to crouch down during the fighting, you get a harrowing portrait of an entire civilization being brought to its knees.

At the National Theatre, I caught up with Bryan Cranston’s galvanizing portrayal of Howard Beale, the disordered false prophet-anchorman of Lee Hall’s overly sermonizing adaptation of the 1976 film Network, directed by none other than the modern master of technology, Ivo van Hove.