Stage director Luís Araújo and Ao Cabo Teatro take us back to the fateful “ides of March” of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, thus marking the beginning of the company’s new artistic direction. A dense and controversial problem-play that takes place in the time of the bloody transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is more than the tragedy of one man or of power: it is the tragedy of Rome as City, that stage and expressive epitome of collective human life. Alienated and corrupt, it kills a tyrant to appease a self-guilt it will not acknowledge and ushers in a new and crueller tyranny. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is also the tragedy of an unseeing, volatile and tense “strange time” with ambiguous ties between private life and public responsibility, between politics and morals – a strangeness that is a possible, ruthless metonymy for the darkness of our own time. Drawing on the re-reading made possible by Fernando Villas-Boas’ new translation and enhancing the play’s self-reflective qualities, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar intends to “question the mechanics of History and Power”. The stage becomes thus the privileged location in which we (re)view and think ourselves as a society, making the theatre a place for reinvention, a “social laboratory of possible futures”.