The answer, I think, is all three. The production had its heart in the right place, but it didn’t work.

Anna Crichlow’s Brutus was at least solid and thoughtful, though perhaps a bit wooden, but Charlotte Bate’s Cassius had all the character’s brittle intensity but none of Cassius’s political cunning. It did not help that they first appeared, puzzlingly, in white suits with a black sash. Dickon Tyrrell’s Caesar had all the dictator’s secret terror, but none of his strength and ruthlessness.

The only one of the major characters who seemed comfortable in his skin was Samuel Oatley as Mark Anthony. His performance was almost, but not quite, spoiled at the start by the director’s decision to have him appear with a shirt open to the waist and carrying a bottle of beer while escorting Caesar, but Oatley’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech was a tour de force.

The minor characters fared no better. Cash Holland seemed to be under directorial instructions to play Brutus’s wife Portia for laughs. Omar Bynon put on a comical regional accent for Decius, presumably so we did not confuse him with the Omar Bynon who played the soothsayer, and he did not convince me that he had the skill to deceive Caesar.

The company of eight wasn’t big enough to fill the vast Globe stage in the action scenes. Most theatre productions do not try to present the battle on stage. But here we were right in the heart of the action, with five or six actors practicing judo on each other – an odd thing to do when you are a soldier with a gun in your hand.

Yet this production had good things going for it. It played to the gallery, just as it should, and the gallery – or in this case the groundlings – rewarded it with plenty of audience participation. Diane Page’s cuts to the script were bold and judicious – Mark Anthony’s last speech was always a lazy way of ending the play, bland and out of character, and we were better off without it.

But big climactic moments were thrown away. Actors wandered around the stage because it was there, rather than using it. The big speeches – Cassius’s “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars”, Caesar’s “I am constant as the northern star” – lost their impact. Page had the right idea, but the implementation wasn’t good enough.