Since we have long been expected — quite properly — to be colour blind over casting at the theatre, why has any presentation of Africa on the stage necessarily to be made, it would seem, through the use, almost exclusively, of black actors? This question is prompted by Gregory Doran’s excellent new Stratford production of Julius Caesar, which shifts the action of the play from Rome to an unspecified state in what used to be called the Dark Continent.

The device, I have to say, works superbly, with a new urgency lent to the play’s powerful political arguments through the placing of the story in a recognisable and recent context.

Obvious comparisons with the likes of, say, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe are invited as the action proceeds.

Crucially, of course, the play concerns the manipulation, through powerful oratory, of the mob, the “idle creatures” of its opening sentence, uttered by the tribune Flavius (Segun Akingbola). Happy and carefree as they are first seen here, grooving to the infectious rhythms supplied by a seven- piece on-stage band, the populace possesses, too — as soon becomes clear — a capacity for sentimentality, greed and cruelty that the wily politicians are not slow to exploit.

None is wilier than Mark Antony, whose astonishing funeral oration for the butchered Caesar (Jeffery Kissoon) — delivered in spine-tingling style by the charismatic Ray Fearon — marks the turning point in the drama.

The mob, which moments before had been shouting its support for the “honourable” Brutus (Paterson Joseph), his friend Cassius (Cyril Nri) and the rest of the conspirators, now rounds on them with venom.

The consequence for the poet Cinna (Jude Owusu), who happens merely to share a name with one of them, is death — delivered in this production (offstage, necessarily) by the gruesome South African method of ‘necklacing’ with a flaming petrol-filled tyre.

The fall-out between Brutus and Cassius that supplies the strongest emotional charge in the second half of the play is brilliantly presented by both actors. The battle-scenes, too, are exceptionally well handled, with a genuine eeriness in the spectral appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Brutus’s tent that precedes them.

Until July 7. Box office: 0844 800 1110 (www.rsc.org.uk). The production tours to the Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury, from September 19 to 22.