Despite the celebrated names in the cast, among them Ben Whishaw, David Morrissey and David Calder, the staging is the star of the production.
This is not so much theatre in the round as theatre in the midst; Hytner has ripped out the theatre’s seating (and large chunks of the text) and younger members of the audience throng around the action, vividly populating the Roman Capitol and the battlefield.
This production aims for the broad effect rather than the telling moment.
It is loud, raucous, visually thrilling and particularly powerful in Anthony’s famous funeral oration (with David Morrissey’s impassioned delivery the evening’s high point) and the final Civil War-torn landscape, all barbed wire and barricades.
This contemporary approach comes at a cost.
It is hard to believe that Calder’s brutish Caesar (in the inevitable post-Trump baseball cap) would ever be compared to a god or that Whishaw’s donnish Brutus could bring himself to murder him.
And, though it is courting danger to say so, the gender-inverted casting militates against the essential masculine politics of the play.