A stab in the dark

MAYBE at some point in the not too distant future, when all entertainment is virtual and delivered directly onto our retinas by AOL-Time Warner Inc., theatre may be the last home of humans with imagination, people searching for an experience beyond flickering surfaces. Maybe, but it's not looking too hopeful right now.

Take, Rattlebag Theatre Company's new Julius Caesar. This is, very approximately, the ten-millionth production of Shakespeare's tragedy.

You might easily imagine that any company that took on such an endeavour outside of the exam revision season must have a very good reason to do so; must have a vision even.

But this is certainly not the case here - unless, of course, you count dressing Roman politician in business suits and soldiers in combat trousers as a visionary strategy.

Director Joe Devlin appears to have aimed to transpose the drama to contemporary Dublin, but most of what seems to have emerged from that operation are items of costume and props that the play itself never requires.

What is largely absent in any forceful notion of how to bring these strange, macho characters or this uncomfortable, familiar yet odd language to life.

Sometimes, a flicker of something with a pulse emerges. Sean Power in particular finds a way into his roles that neither Kristian Marken (as Brutus) nor Aiden Condron (as Mark Antony) have apparently discovered for theirs.

Matters were not helped by some early technical glitches, which rendered one strobe-lit night time storm scene even murkier than intended. The technology, it seems, is winning the war already.

LUKE CLANCY