THEATRE / Caesar salad: Paul Taylor on the English Shakespeare Company's Julius Caesar

The arrival in London of the English Shakespeare Company's Julius Caesar coincides with the announcement that, because of funding cuts, the company will next April have to abandon the large-scale tours that gave it such a high profile in the late Eighties. A projected two- year tour of Goethe's Faust has had to be scrapped and it now intends to concentrate on the work of the company's education department.

But beyond the sadness you feel, on principle, at the demise of any touring outfit (the Arts Council's lack of a coherent policy on the subject having pushed Compass off the road as well), it would be hypocritical for this reviewer to claim to be grief- stricken. The ESC's barnstorming populism has recently begun to show signs of imaginative bankruptcy.

The updatings designed to render the plays more immediate to those unused to watching Shakespeare often made the stories incoherent and made the tone of the event condescending. Set in Mussolini's Italy, for example, their Merchant of Venice asked you to believe that a crowd of black shirts would stand by while a Jew prepared to lop a pound of flesh from a gentile.

The company's trademark rough-and-readiness is evident, too, in Tim Carroll's account of Julius Caesar as 20th-century types pile on to the coarsely constructed stockade of planks which is the set. But otherwise, this is an uncharacteristically restrained affair that at least does not insult Eastern Europeans by forcing fashionable parallels between them and the play's mob. Twisting into postures of stylised remorse when Alex Hardy's hectic Antony reveals the contents of Caesar's will, this crowd has a more generic force.

Culturally, though, it's a confusing world where the soothsayer is a piping-voiced schoolboy, where David Sterne's Caesar looks to be no more than a seedy racketeer or small-time gangster and where the conspirators all wear red Aids ribbons which they pin on to Caesar in an unsubtle dress rehearsal of the assassination. That booming Brutus, played by Burt Caesar and seemingly hypnotised by his own high- mindedness, should be seen during the wars slaughtering a sacrificial animal feels oddly right, though. The elevated ritualistic gestures remind you that this was how Brutus vainly wanted the assassination to look.

As for the posthumous Caesar, he has even less power to impress than he did in life. When his ghost appears to Brutus, a door flies open to reveal what looks like Sir Les Patterson after a serious overdose of summer pudding and Chardonnay.

Shaw Theatre, London NW1, to Saturday (071-388 1394). Then tours.