The choice of commissioning a young Italian company based in Rome to stage a production of Julius Caesar during the Globe to Globe Festival seemed informed by the same logic that led the organizers to select the National Theatre of Greece to perform Pericles. But, in fact, Andrea Baracco and Vincenzo Manna's Giulio Cesare pre-existed the Festival, at least as a 50-minute-long studio workshop inspired by the first two acts of Shakespeare's tragedy and provisionally entitled Ventitrè, as in the twenty-three stab-wounds inflicted by the conspirators on Caesar's body. And, as it turned out, Caesar's Rome and any reference to the historical setting within which Caesar's murder took place were cut in the pared-down, modern-dress version skilfully performed by six actors (with little doubling) at the Globe Theatre on 1 and 2 May 2012.

Baracco's Giulio Cesare was not as far removed from Shakespeare's play and its classical setting as Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Giulio Cesare, which was performed in the capital as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 1999. However, Baracco's production did catapult Shakespeare's main characters into a world where their innermost fears and desires have effectively obliterated the outside world, the public sphere, and any remnant of functional social interactions. Baracco's take on Shakespeare's play was instead firmly focused on the disjointed inner lives of characters pushed to their psychological and moral limits by the extreme circumstances and events that eventually destroy them. Instead of representing Julius Caesar as a tragedy set in classical Rome or even in twentieth-century Rome, as several productions in English have done by casting Cesare as a fascist dictator, Baracco opted for an original and exciting journey into the play's ‘heart of darkness’, effectively suggested through the heavily symbolic language of physical theatre.