Ralph fails to make his Mark

Not since 1926, when Julius Caesar played in Hollywood with 3,000 soldiers, 300 gladiators and dancing girls as extras has there been an English language staging more spectacularly packed with crowds of Roman citizens than Deborah Warner's extraordinary, modern dress production.

Her big pack of extras alone stirs excitement in a contemporary production that draws no telling analogies between the overthrowing of an autocratic political regime then and now.

The psychological drama, centring on the conspiracy to kill Caesar and Brutus's tussle with his conscience and Simon Russell Beale's sinister Cassius, rarely comes across with power or persuasiveness. One hundred and five angry, uproarious Plebeians do, though, make a thrilling impact on the key forum scene.

Ralph Fiennes's Antony, who first appears ridiculously prancing around in white trousers, vest and scarf, behaving like a cross between Caesar's personal valet, male model and off-duty footballer, shakes the odd hand in the crowd assembled to welcome their ruling autocrat.

Shakespeare requires just four plebeians to speak. As a hundred-strong crowd strains at crush barriers and breaks through, roars in discontent, shouts out of turn as Antony artfully incites them to loathing of Anton Lesser's Brutus, it really feels as if you are witnessing the dangerous art of demagoguery rather than a theatrical demonstration of it.

The blazing theatricality of the scene is fully realised. At least it would be if the introverted Fiennes, at his best before the cameras but certainly giving a more heartfelt stage performance than he has managed in years, could produce high voltage rage and rhetoric when appealing to his countrymen. Unfortunately passion and Fiennes normally give each other the cold shoulder on stage.

Astonishingly Miss Warner fails to make use of her hundred extras where they are most needed - as soldiers in the civil war battle-field scenes of the play's straggling finale of suicide and regret.

Just a few odd military men stagger across the stage to fight minimalist battles: a golden opportunity lost. The production suffered another loss, too, when Paul Rhys, ideally cast as the agonised Brutus, had to leave the play after succumbing to pneumonia.

His replacement, the experienced Anton Lesser, makes a testily anxious, self-isolating but not very martial Brutus. He falls disturbed victim to the manipulations of Russell Beale's conspiratorial Cassius who chillingly greets Caesar's murder with a small, strange yelp of exultation.

Russell Beale, donkey-jacketed, sporting a woollen waistcoat and suit, looks no more at home as a Roman soldier than he was as a Scottish one in Macbeth. His Cassius lacks a dangerous edge, a malcontent's sly vigour. His big quarrel with Brutus is lost in the bare, blank space that designer Tom Pye mistakenly creates for the play.