Though far from the Ides of March, the portents have not been good – strange flashes in the sky followed by storms and torrential downpours.

It’s been enough to make the hardiest soul forget that the first production of Julius Caesar took place in London in September 1599.

Shakespeare took a real historical event – the assassination of the mightiest man in Ancient Rome – and turned it into a compelling metaphor for Tudor England, nervously awaiting the arrival of the 17th Century and a successor for all-powerful Elizabeth 1.

Shakespeare’s dramatised parable about regime change by violent means has never ceased to act as a mirror for changing times.

Orson Welles’ 1930s Mercury Theatre production set the action in the Fascist Rome of Mussolini. John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated America’s Caesar – President Abraham Lincoln – played the part of Mark Antony, Caesar’s avenging best friend.

Gregory Doran’s all-black Royal Shakespeare Company production transfers the drama to East Africa on the back of the still unresolved Arab Spring. It worked powerfully as a BBC television film earlier this year. Does it work in the theatre?

For the most part it does; but after the tremendous set-pieces of Caesar’s murder, which closes the first half, and the speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony after the interval, a good deal of the remainder is an anti-climax and requires perhaps a change of tempo and a little Welles-style editing.

Men rushing on and off stage in berets and camouflage battledress waving blades and machine guns at times seems like something out of The Wild Geese.

Nevertheless, the rapt attention of the audience, which contained many school pupils, was testimony enough to this production in which Ray Fearon as Mark Antony, Jeffery Kissoon as Caesar, Patterson Joseph as Brutus and Cyril Nri as Cassius are outstanding.

At its best this RSC production, five long years after their last show in Bradford, is proof positive of art’s ability to transcend the time and place of its creation.

Julius Caesar is on at The Alhambra until Saturday. There are matinees today and on Saturday. The booking office number is (01274) 432000.