First Encounters: Julius Caesar review – so thrilling it kept a hall full of teens in pin-drop silence

Ormiston Bushfield Academy, Peterborough
An intro to Shakespeare doesn’t get any better than the RSC’s revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female prison-set production led by Harriet Walter, which is touring schools

The auditorium is stripped bare – a repurposed hall whose ascending seating resembles an amphitheatre but with plastic chairs. This show could pass for a school production, in appearance, if you didn’t know better. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar, which originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012, is now touring secondary schools.

We are in Peterborough, but also in Rome and in a women’s prison: Shakespeare is framed within an incarceration story, which occasionally impinges on it with interruptions from guards and prison protocols.