RSC's All-Female Julius Caesar Tours Schools After Donmar Hit

The Royal Shakespeare Company has revived Phyllida Lloyd's all-female Julius Caesar and sent it on tour of secondary schools, with a stop at Ormiston Bushfield Academy in Peterborough that kept a hall full of teenagers in what a reviewer described as pin-drop silence.

The production originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012. Lloyd's concept sets Shakespeare's Rome inside a women's prison, with guards' interruptions and prison protocols periodically impinging on the play's action. Harriet Walter leads the cast.

At Peterborough, the staging is deliberately austere. The auditorium is stripped bare — a repurposed hall whose ascending seating resembles an amphitheatre but with plastic chairs. The show could pass for a school production in appearance, as the Guardian's review notes, "if you didn't know better."

The setting works on three levels at once. "We are in Peterborough, but also in Rome and in a women's prison," the review states. Shakespeare is framed within an incarceration story, a device that occasionally interrupts the drama with guards and institutional rules.

The reviewer's verdict is unambiguous: "An intro to Shakespeare doesn't get any better than this," calling the production "so thrilling it kept a hall full of teens in pin-drop silence."

The schools tour marks a notable shift for a production that began in the intimate commercial confines of the Donmar Warehouse more than a decade ago. Lloyd's all-female staging was a landmark of the 2012 London season, and its second life in school gyms and assembly halls now brings that same framing — power, confinement and political violence played out by a women's ensemble — to students encountering the play for the first time.