There is a lot packed into the short running time of Joy Nesbitt’s Julius Caesar Variety Show. It is energetic, well acted, frequently funny and undoubtedly clever. My reservation is that clever and particularly interesting are not necessarily the same thing.
The premise gives Nesbitt plenty to play with. Three actors arrive to audition for Julius Caesar, while outside the theatre an increasingly angry mob protests against plans to convert the building into an asylum hotel. Inside, questions of casting, identity and theatrical power begin to collide as the director pushes his performers in search of something authentic.
It is certainly current. The mob outside inevitably carries echoes of recent protests around asylum accommodation, while Shakespeare supplies another mob, along with political manipulation, rhetoric, betrayal and power. But that is also where I began to find the piece slightly lazy. Once substantial chunks of Julius Caesar itself enter the dialogue, Shakespeare is doing rather a lot of the heavy lifting. The parallels are clever, but hardly unexpected.
There is an interesting comparison with The Jolly Fisherman, another Fringe production concerned, in quite a different way, with what a building is and what it might become. There, I felt the emotional pull of the place itself. Here, despite the threatened loss of a theatre, there is strangely little love for the building. We understand that these people want it to remain a theatre, but never really feel why this particular theatre matters.
The acting is good throughout and there is considerable fun in watching the increasingly uncomfortable audition process unfold. Nesbitt also manages to squeeze questions of race, gender, representation, directorial power, immigration and cultural ownership into an hour without the whole thing collapsing under their combined weight.
Perhaps that is an achievement in itself. Yet the sheer quantity of ideas cannot entirely disguise how familiar many of them are. An angry mob outside, Shakespearean rhetoric inside, a manipulative director and performers confronting questions of identity all fit together efficiently, perhaps too efficiently.
I enjoyed Julius Caesar Variety Show. It is sharp, topical and accomplished, and its cast serve it well. I just wanted its considerable cleverness to lead somewhere more surprising.
Playing until August 31st 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026JULIUSC
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 11th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr
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