Excluding Timon of Athens, as modern theatre mercifully does, Julius Caesar is Shakespeare's worst Roman play. The others have their faults - Troilus and Cressida, in particular, swamps its fascinating heroine with one of literature's dreariest takes on the Trojan War - but no Roman tragedy is as potentially difficult as Caesar. Despite an abundance of Shakespeare's most famous lines - if the audience isn't lending its ears, it's crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war, &c &c, the uneasy prequel to Antony and Cleopatra often disappoints. Unfortunately, Lucy Bailey's new production for the RSC fails to solve any of the problems of the text. Instead, visual trickery and multimedia effects fail to disguise sloppy characterisation and a lack of directorial grip.

"With nothing of either the warrior or the politican about him, Greg Hicks's high camp Caesar is totally incompatible with the text." (Image © Ellie Kurtz)

Grip is what is needed here. From the page to the stage, this production is a mess. There's no real protagonist: Caesar himself is dead by the interval, leaving us with a choice of Brutus, Cassius and Octavius Caesar. The last is a cardboard cutout young-king-on-the-make, less complicated and less interesting than Malcom at the end of Macbeth, or Hal with the dying Henry IV. Brutus and Cassius, played by Sam Troughton and John Mackay, remain essentially shadowy figures as the chief co-conspirators, giving the audience little idea of their motivations. Troughton offers an effective turn as a weird-eyed boy-king, with a surge of emotional intensity in the late second half. Unfortunately, his sudden show of affection (and perhaps even desire) for his page, Lucius, is so unprecedented as to be unbelievable, and as a result his performance seems oddly disjointed. Mackay, a usually strong actor who does good work elsewhere, is here less an enigma than a psychological blank. Unfortunately, strong, clear decision-making regarding character psychology is exactly what Shakespeare's weirdly disjointed, supernatural political thriller requires: what pushes Cassisus’s conspirators to select Brutus as their figurehead to assassinate Caesar? Why does Antony stay loyal when others do not, and how sincere is either Cassisus’s love for Brutus, or Caesar’s for his people? Disappointing performances from the men sees the audience look to the women; and here, the lack of a strong heroine is deeply felt. Instead of Volumnia, Cleopatra or Creesida, we have Calphurnia, who despite claiming she's 'stronger than her sex', never shows any signs of being so, and Portia, the overwrought and incipiently mad wife of Brutus; Lady Macbeth's skinny younger sister. Hannah Young is arresting in her cameo as the latter, fragile and desperate, but two scenes cannot carry the emotional interest of a production. Unfortunately, of all the problems with the new Long Ensemble's first tragedy, the biggest lies with Caesar himself.

With nothing of either the warrior or the politican about him, Greg Hicks's high camp Caesar is totally incompatible with the text, Hicks's hammy hubris making it impossible he was ever a charismatic, let alone near-deified political leader. Worse, his overblown and florid style of movement and speech really slows the production down; alive, he drags scenes out by playing for unnecessary laughs. When dead, wafting across the stage as a luridly bloody ghost, all but rattling his chains, Hicks's Caesar sends the RSC back to the bad old days of endemic melodrama. He even takes ages to die. As Mark Antony, Darrell D'Silva’s grizzled soldier then has the doubly difficult task of not only saving ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ (one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches) from familiarity-bred contempt, but also trying to turn Hicks’s unusually overblown Caesar into a leader worth honouring. This is made even trickier by the fact that – nearly two hours into performance – most of the now-restive audience is clearly longing for the interval.

It's not all dull. When Greg Hicks’s Caesar refuses the crown of Rome, the city fills with zombies, men spontaneously combust and lions give birth in the streets. This gory horror is the kind of chaos Lucy Bailey’s production thrives on conveying. Film screens at the back of the stage show Rome in scarlet flames, lightning flashes into the audience’s eyes and citizens dart terrified through the streets. When the high-concept, high-technology aesthetic can accommodate the terrors of the text, Bailey’s visual choices (created with partner Bill Dudley as designer) work well. Film, able to convey a visual scale which live theatre cannot match, successfully conveys the epic scale of Roman armies: the battle sequences (the same group of wraith-like actors animated in repeat across five screens) see real-life actors emerge from behind the translucent screens onto which their animated counterparts are projected. The repetitive animations also provide an effective backdrop to the ‘living’ Roman citizens, with their balletic, heavily stylised gestures of approbation or despair. Both film and theatre are primarily concerned with narrative and storytelling, however, and none but the most abstract examples of either form can survive when storytelling is sacrificed to mere visual trickery.

Lucy Bailey’s new production illustrates this problem. Bloated by overlong sequences of all-purpose Roman degeneracy, with extras swilling booze and ravishing each other without implications for the plot, this Julius Caesar settles for conveying a general sense of a stereotypically decadent Rome, rather than focusing in on individuated characters and meaningful psychology. A shorter first half and sharper characterisation (any decisions would be better than none) could save this play. This cast is the second half of the RSC's New Ensemble, their colleagues opening As You Like It a few weeks ago; if you have to make a choice, lend your ears to the Forest of Arden, and not to this undernourished, overcomplicated work.