The tent scene is such a beautiful scene. The boy sings to Brutus and it’s calm and then slowly the atmosphere changes and suddenly the Ghost of Caesar appears and warns Brutus about Philippi. Ian Hogg just walked on stage—we put body makeup on him, and Ben Ormerod lit it beautifully—and it becomes an expression of the inner fear and turmoil of the person who sees the Ghost.

Farr: No, because we demystified it completely. He literally just walked on and sat next to him in the tent: un-supernatural, real and strangely effective. It shone better than big shards of light and music would have done, but that is just the way we did it in our production, that suited our style. Our style was basically an honest style all the way through the piece and the honesty of that suited our production.

Bailey: Elizabethans believed that ghosts were not wispy things that float, but concrete—literally the corpse would come out of its grave. Greg Hicks, who played Caesar, was interested in pursuing something more demonic, but we came back to this more simple approach. In addition we had Caesar’s widow, Calpurnia, dressed in black with a black veil over her face, lead his bleeding corpse into Brutus’ tent. I wanted to remind the audience of this woman who otherwise has disappeared from the play, placing her personal grief as another consequence of their crime. By bringing her on stage it suggested that her rage and lament at losing her man is telepathically in sync with Brutus’ guilt and grief.

Is the transition from the political first half of the play to the military second half difficult to achieve?

Hall: I didn’t have an interval. My production was probably quite different to other productions; it was two hours fifteen minutes straight through, so as Rome burned the mob turned into marching soldiers while music hammered out and they sang and then at the end of that sequence there was Cassius standing in front of his army. It was continuous. In the latter part of the play I binned all those ludicrous people who Shakespeare gets to run on obsessively and commit suicide, who you’ve never met before and who you don’t care about. I think some of them were a result of Shakespeare being seduced by the excesses of Plutarch … It was a straight-through show with no interval so I didn’t even notice the join at all.

Farr: That is why the modern setting works so well. We emphasized it. The first half took place in a strongly inner-city civilian environment, men in suits, coffee cups; we revealed the language of modernity, often in an ordinary way. And then suddenly of course to transfer that across into a war erupting is something that we all know happens. Rome at that time was not exactly a fledgling state, but it had a vulnerability about it, it was still discovering what it was, so we used as a source a nation state which was relatively young; we explored Ukraine and Georgia and states where there was a fragility inherent within the nation. That was useful, but I would say that is still true of America now, and true of much of the world still: there is an inherent uncertainty about what the nation is and what it should stand for.

Bailey: When I first read the play it was very clear how tricky the second half could be, as from big solid scenes the play becomes a series of fragmented skirmishes. My first thought was to perform the play without an interval simply to keep up the furious pace and horrifying escalation of violence. I also remember telling myself that the key to the play would be to give as much weight and time to the military scenes and not to rush them, or cut them. The technique of duplicating the stage action with the projected images really helped to flesh out the imagination of these scenes. Our soundscape was as huge, repetitive, and unrelenting as the gesture world on stage.

One of the important strands of research was the story of Romulus and Remus founding Rome. As the story goes, these twins, who according to legend were raised by a she-wolf, fought each other to the death over a piece of land. For me this became the key to this piece: Rome was founded in bloodshed. This one act is followed by an endless saga of slaughter in the name of Rome: from the twins fighting it out on a lonely hillside to the vast field of blood that is the Empire. So in my staging as a prologue to the show, Romulus kills Remus and the first blood is spilt. We repeated the manner of this savage and primal killing in the battle scenes where the soldiers, having begun in formation, disintegrate into bestial violence.

What did you make of the roles of the wives (and more locally of the odd detail of the double reporting of Portia’s suicide)?

Hall: Both the women in the play know exactly what is going on with their men. Calpurnia dreams about what is going to happen to Caesar and tells him not to go to the Senate. It is a wonderful chapter of this story: you have got a man who knows he is going to be murdered but that is not going to stop him going to the Senate because he is Caesar, and who are they to stand up against him? If he didn’t go, he wouldn’t be Caesar.