If, like me, you watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Julius Caesar on BBC TV earlier this year and intend going to see it at the Alhambra next month, you’re in for a surprise.

Ray Fearon, who plays Mark Antony, said: “When we did the television version we rehearsed for four weeks. We hadn’t done it in the theatre then. Apart from the forum scene, we did it on location. Most of the play will have changed, although it is still placed in Africa with East African accents.”

South African actor John Kani told Gregory Doran, the play’s director: “This is Shakespeare’s Africa play.”

Ray, whose brother Ricky appears alongside him in his first RSC season as Cicero and Lucilius, said the company referenced a complete Shakespeare volume that was passed around the jail on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent nearly 30 years as a prisoner.

Each prisoner chose a different quote to sign. Mr Mandela’s was Caesar’s reply to Calpurnia, his wife: “Cowards die many times before their deaths/ The valiant never taste of death but once.”

That book is now part of an RSC exhibition at London’s British Museum, which Ray said he was still trying to see.

Regime change by violent means risks one tyrant being replaced by another, so is murdered Caesar’s avenger Mark Antony, the man who famously asks the raucous Roman mob to “lend me your ears”, a hero or just another would-be dictator?

“I wouldn’t say a dictator. I wouldn’t even say Caesar was a tyrant. It is supposed by Brutus and Cassius that he might become one. But I don’t think there’s anything in the play that says Caesar was a tyrant,” he added.

What Caesar could become is, therefore, merely a pretext for bumping him off. As Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony is understandably apprehensive about who the assassins might turn on next. So he gets rid of them.

“Mark Antony becomes what he becomes through circumstances. What happens in war is you have to make decisions that are unpopular, and that’s what he does. Throughout the play people change.”

The trick with Shakespeare is to forget the rhetoric, the passages of purple prose or sublime poetry, and understand the context of a particular speech, Ray said. Mark Antony’s funeral oration above Caesar’s bleeding corpse is a case in point.

“You’re trying to arouse people, to get them on your side. This speech has a job to do,” he added.

Whether motivated by idealism, jealously or greed for power, whatever Brutus and Cassius hoped for, the outcome of Caesar’s death is a power struggle that ultimately results in civil war and genocide.

Power struggles, military coups, democrats turning into despots, have been true of a good deal of the African sub-continent since independence from colonial domination.

“Caesar could be Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu or Mugabe,” said Gregory Doran. In that sense he could also be Mubarak, Gaddafi or Syria’s President Assad.

Ray said: “This stuff is in our world – it’s happening today, and yet this play was written nearly 500 years ago.”

  • Julius Caesar is on at the Alhambra from September 25 to 29, starting at 7.30pm. For tickets ring (01274) 432000.