Anyone who saw Lucy Bailey's gripping and gory Titus Andronicus at the Globe will know what to expect. That production had members of its audience fainting, so vivid was the violence.
For Shakespeare's political thriller Bailey gives notice of the bloodletting to come with a pre-play fight to the death between the twin, mythical founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Here, the city that is created as a result of Romulus's victory (not that we can tell which of these two grunting, primeval urchins is which) is not a cultivated metropolis, but a town of casual and brutal violence, ruled by Greg Hicks's psychotically vainglorious Caesar.
For the crowd scenes the cast mingle with projections of a computer generated populous, which is very effective when the actors and the projections move in synch, but just looks plain odd when they do not. Still, we get a sense of the unthinking mob that can be placated or enraged by a charismatic figure such as Darrell D'Silva's Mark Antony.
Yet the tension in this RSC production is derived more from a premonition of violence (duly delivered) than the fate of the conspirators, led by John Mackay's Cassius and Sam Troughton's Brutus. Had Brutus appeared less oddly motivated here -a strange mix of Macbeth-like wide-eyed ambition and public-spirited piety - we might have cared more about their fate.
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