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society. He stripped down the stage, using only a textured brick wall onto which images could be projected and effects created with inventive lighting:
    Hands, who likes to light his own shows, creates wonders here. The prodigies of the fatal night conjure up fantastic shapes against the flaring colours of the brick. Shadows mysteriously emerge as from Hades while beams of light spot each of the conspirators in turn. 69
    His lighting in
Julius Caesar
is sculptural. It subtly alters the texture and surfaces and manipulates space like a shaping force. This is important, because it underlines what seems to me Hands’s main insight into the play. Its first half is mostly bathed in the cold light of public politics. Caesar (David Waller) is an insufferable conviction politician who thrives on exposure. His is a harsh, imperious world: the space is defined by brutal columns of white light which might have been designed by Albert Speer. 70

    3. Terry Hands’s production in 1987 had a stripped-down stage and instead used lighting sculpturally. His was “a harsh, imperious world: the space is defined by brutal columns of white light.”
    Clearly, there’s no alternative to Caesar, and the senators conspire in private darkness; at the end, Brutus and Cassius are isolated in black spaces of error, terror and division pierced by sinister shafts of purple light. 71
    David Thacker’s 1993 production at The Other Place was the first RSC production of
Julius Caesar
to dispense with Roman dress. He set his play in a very recognizable European world of late twentieth-century conflict:
    1989 was a time of huge change in eastern European society. As a revolutionary play
Julius Caesar
sits happily in revolutionarytimes. We felt that the political schism in the Eastern Bloc which is so fresh in our minds would give the production dynamism and contemporary relevance … We agreed there was little to be gained from squeezing the play into a specifically Romanian, Russian or Czechoslovakian setting or by saying that Caesar is Gorbachev, Ceauşescu, Honecker. We were not wanting to create direct or specific parallels but rather to draw on the power of contemporary political change in order to demonstrate the seriousness and relevance of the issues addressed in the play. To be non-specific about a setting is not to be evasive or indecisive but to allow members of the audience to make other associations of dictatorship and the struggle for democracy for instance in South Africa or Latin America.
    The potency of modern dress cannot be underestimated for an audience which might find Shakespeare’s verse alienating. Images of suited politicians and uniformed generals in contrast to a poorly dressed crowd have the immediacy and apparent veracity of a news story on television. The struggle for democracy encapsulated in
Julius Caesar
is sadly still going on. 72
    In order to hit home the contemporary experience and make the audience more directly involved with the action of the play, Thacker decided to stage the play as a promenade production. The audience stood around the actors, witnesses to the action at close proximity. One reviewer commented:
    To find yourself standing a mere yard from the assassins as they roll up their shirt-sleeves and bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood is as nicely horrid as you can imagine. 73
    In an interview for the
Independent
, Thacker explained his choice:
    This is a play about people manipulating or dealing with crowds … I thought it would be theatrically exciting to have people there on stage so they experience being in a large group of people hearing the speeches. I hope it might make them think “Would I believe this?” in a more concrete way than usual. 74

    4. David Thacker’s 1993 RSC production had a promenade audience: “To find yourself standing a mere yard from the assassins as they roll up their shirt-sleeves and bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood is as nicely horrid as you can imagine.”
    A fine