How tyranny translates

“Cowards die many times before their deaths: / The valiant never taste of death but once. / Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, / It seems to me most strange that men should fear, / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.”

Julius Caesar has a particular resonance in postcolonial Africa. It’s a play about a coup and a civil war, a sonorous political narrative on a continent that has experienced numerous civil wars in the past decade. It is a play in which an autocracy is replaced by chaos and another autocracy; a clash of characters in which good guys and bad guys are often indistinguishable. Greg Doran, the in­coming artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, claims it’s the Shakespeare play most often performed in modern Africa, and the most immediate to its political leaders. So Doran had the idea to set a modern-dress Julius ­Caesar in an unnamed East or Central African state, with a black British cast.

Earlier this month, I met him and his company at the RSC’s rehearsal rooms in Clapham, southwest London. With weeks to go, the play was like an empty, new-built house: strong and functional. Only the furnishing and decorating were still to do. The actors carried props — AK-47s and machetes — but performed in their own clothes, on a stage without scenery. In a break between rehearsals, Doran — a self-described “middle-aged, middle-class gay man”, with long, wavy hair and a gentle manner — explains why he has chosen to direct Julius Caesar this way.

“It’s a play I’ve been fascinated by for a long time,” he says. “But there is always this curious sense that it has an anti­climax, that after the assassination of Caesar it seems to fall away. The one thing you know is that he’s going to die. What you should be asking is: what’s going to happen next? As the Arab spring has been happening, we should be more alert to that as a question. What follows those dictatorships?”

There are, Doran suggests, manifold inspirations for the character of Caesar in postcolonial Africa. “Whether it’s Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe,” he says, “or someone more benevolent. Maybe a ­figure like Kwame Nkrumah [the first president of Ghana]. The point is that Shakespeare is clever about not coming down on any particular side. In the first scene, Caesar appears incredibly popular. In the second, he seems to be the ruthless dictator. In the scene where you see him in his house, he’s this vulnerable old man.” And then, of course, he dies.

The one thing you know is that he's going to die. What you should ask is: what happens next?

One of the interesting side effects of using an all-black British cast is that many in the company have a direct connection to Africa and to its uncivil wars. Adjoa Andoh, the fine-featured actor who plays Brutus’s wife, Portia, has lived in Britain all her life. But her father was a well-known journalist in pre-independence Ghana, and when Nkrumah came to power his life changed dramatically.

“Everybody adored Nkrumah,” she says. “But Ghana was the first sub-­Saharan African country to gain its ­independence, so there was a lot of work to destabilise the government. And Nkrumah rightly became paranoid. One of the consequences of his paranoia was that the press was no longer free. So my dad ended up having to flee — and came to England as a political exile.

“In Julius Caesar, who’s free to speak? We have the two guys at the beginning, Marullus and Flavius, taking down the images [of Caesar]. We hear later on from Casca that they’ve been put to death for showing opposition to the celebration of Caesar on his return. And I know that people who spoke out in opposition in Ghana met with... not good ends. They were exiled or imprisoned or disappeared. So you’ve got the same thing about having hope in a leader who becomes paranoid. You can see that across much of Africa.”

Ivanno Jeremiah plays Octavius ­Caesar, who, by the end of the play, has emerged as the most likely new ruler of the empire: a fledgling dictator who cuts a particularly ruthless swathe through Roman society, putting to death 100 ­senators. Jeremiah knows something of dictators. Twenty-three years ago, when he was a baby, his mother fled Amin’s reign of terror. She has still not been able to tell her son the details of what ­happened to her. “We were quite an old Ugandan family, and through numerous stages of the regime we were affected in numerous different ways,” he says. “You know, goods being seized, a couple of assassinations. My mother’s husband was assassinated [Jeremiah doesn’t call this man his father, and declines to ­elaborate].” How does his mother’s ­experience of a dictator’s rule affect his understanding of the play? “I think it just puts it in context,” he says. “You can see from the immediate effect in our house on a lady who now lives in a completely different country, 23, 24 years on. But the fear, or whatever sensation she felt at the time, is still something she hasn’t quite been able to overcome, in order to explain to her children.”

Jeremiah spent two years living in East Africa as a teenager. He learnt Acholi, his mother tongue, and reconnected with his heritage. The combination of his family’s story and his subsequent experiences on the “red earth” of Africa has fed into his understanding of Octavius. “I want to make him as much of a monster as pos­sible,” he says. “And send the message that there’s nothing nice or glamorous or sexy about this atmosphere, this regime.”

Not all the cast have such deep links to the worlds of African despots, though there are those who fled the Biafran ­conflict as children (Cyril Nri, who plays Cassius), and those with family members who were involved in the struggle for independence in Zimbabwe (Simon Manyonda, who plays Lucius).

What’s most striking about watching rehearsals is how honed the drama is, at this early stage. In fact, the actors have already performed much of the play for television cameras. In a collaboration with the BBC, the play’s interior scenes were filmed in a disused Chinese market in Colindale, north London, in April. The crowd scenes will be recorded during live performances of the stage play, in Stratford-upon-Avon — and the two spliced together will make a feature film, to be shown on BBC4 later in summer.

Nri hopes that the theatre and tele­vision audiences don’t regard this as the “all-black” version. “It’s just a different slant on it, and just as valid. There are many enclosed, domestic scenes in the play. It’s about showing the way in which these small areas of our lives impact on the bigger stage. I hope people will come to this play and think that it’s actually fresh and opening up new things.”

Watching the company rehearse ­several scenes in Acts IV and V, where the play darkens into a litany of suicide, it seems obvious that Doran’s version has made the play new again. And despite the gloomy content of these scenes, the rehearsal room is a lively place. After some debate between Doran and Marcus Griffiths, the actor playing the minor role of Pindarus, about his motivation, the director calls an end to the discussion. “Yes, but Shakespeare did not call the play Julius Caesar or the Tragedy of Pindarus,” he says, to hoots.

For the most part, the drama is kinetic and utterly engrossing. In particular, the crucial moment in which Brutus, played by Paterson Joseph, quarrels with Nri’s Cassius feels cloyingly intimate. As I leave the rehearsal rooms, I realise what the greatest success of this production might be. After a few minutes, one has forgotten not only that the actors are speaking 16th-century verse, but that the play is set in Africa.

Julius Caesar, RST, Stratford-upon-Avon, until July 7; Newcastle Theatre Royal, July 19-28; Noël Coward, WC2, August 8-September 15; details at rsc.org.uk