Lucy Bailey opens her RSC revival of Julius Caesar with a growling Romulus and a snarling Remus in mortal combat beneath a large picture of the she-wolf that nurtured them. Spurious stuff, both textually and historically, but not without a point. There’s about to be a furious fraternal blood-letting in the Rome that the feral boys founded. And the scene introduces the feast of Lupercal: which here means wild blokes roaring about the bare stage in masks evoking Big Bad Wolves hunting down Red Riding Hoods.

I wouldn’t say the production goes downhill from this interestingly ominous start, but it’s seldom so exciting afterwards. Indeed, Bailey’s attempt to bring to life the Roman mob as it responds first to Brutus, then to Antony, doesn’t really work. There are back projections of plebeians, their raised arms waving, but they aren’t more disturbing than teenagers at a pop concert or much more realistic than sea-anenomes caught in a current.

The stand-out performance comes from Greg Hicks, a Caesar who exudes arrogance with everything from his voice to his swagger to a weird gesture when he airily waves his own spittle into the middle distance, as if that alone would defeat a German tribe or senatorial cabal. Certainly, I found myself wishing he’d wait a bit longer for his murder or spend more time on stage as the ghost who, in Bailey’s revival, skewers Brutus before he can run suicidally on to Strato’s sword, re-emphasising what he’d already demonstrated: that Caesar is “mighty yet”.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Sam Troughton’s Brutus. He’s decent, earnest, attractive: partly a youngish stoic philosopher, partly an older version of the sixth-form prefect who thinks that the head of the school must be brought down a few hundred pegs. But he misses the pious narcissism of the man who, while making bad decisions galore, keeps praising his own probity and honour in the third person, and, though there’s a moment when he drops to the ground and sobs, he lacks the sense of struggle the role needs.

Nor is there much wrong with John Mackay’s Cassius, a man who more than justifies Caesar’s slurs by being exceptionally thin and thinking thoughts that he expresses with the articulate dispassion that conceals passion, or with Darrell D’Silva’s Mark Antony. His first action, which is relieving a hangover by throwing up, is an apt introduction to a man who manages to be both coarse soldier and wily demagogue. They’re fine. The production is OK. Just not top-notch.

Box office: 0844 8001110, to Oct 2

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