Forget the ides of March. Beware the tent scene above all

Do you like a quickie, or are you happy to hunker down for the whole night? At the theatre, that is. While the 90-minute option is fashionable, there are plenty of opportunities to go long haul, particularly with Deborah Warner's epic, three-and-a-half-hour Julius Caesar.

When the first - indeed, the only - break in this show is reached, the curtain falls leaving the murdered body of the poet Cinna lying upstage, exposed. It's quite theatrical. But in a show boasting 100 extras, crowd control barriers and a champagne-soaked Ralph Fiennes, theatrical gestures are the order of the night.

When the interval finally came, everyone sat in a semi-stunned state for a couple of seconds before going in search of alcohol. After 20 minutes, we all returned to our seats, feeling a bit like Australia-bound air passengers might after refuelling in Hong Kong.

A teenage boy, who was probably studying the play and had been brought along on a school night as a great treat, lay wearily against his father. "Is there going to be much more?" he moaned. Someone leaned over to chat to a couple in the seats behind us. "It's after the death of Cinna where everything starts to really count," he whispered. "If they get the tent scene wrong, we are doomed." The house lights dimmed, and everyone prepared for the final onslaught.

Forget the ides of March: clearly directors must beware the tent scene above all. This rather static moment is when Brutus (Anton Lesser) and Cassius (Simon Russell Beale) argue about strategy, before a rattling sequence of war scenes. Take it slowly and the play drags. Speed it up and no one will grasp the tragic consequence of the skeins of the conspiracy beginning to fray. The tent scene is the beginning of the end of the Cassius-Brutus Granita pact, as it were.

At the end, people were still obsessing about whether Warner's tent had matched celebrated tents of the past. One national newspaper critic bustled past. "The tent scene was far too long. Too many pauses!" Yet the longueurs, and there are many, gave a chance to focus on the ghastly psychological state of the situation and the protagonists within it.

Would it have been better with, say, half an hour shaved off? The National Theatre staged a 90-minute Measure for Measure

last year that left you breathless but satisfied. However, Julius

Caesar is such a mesmerising analysis of power, leadership and political loyalty that, when it came to the end, it seemed three and a half hours weren't enough. I suppose one will just have to follow the action, played out by a different cast in the world outside the theatre, over the next fortnight.

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