WHETHER its testimony to the genius of William Shakespeare or a damning indictment of mankind, its still startling how relevant Julius Caesar remains, over 400 years after it was written. The bard's take on politics was that rhetoric was the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and that every action and decision made by the powers that be should be screened for ulterior motives.

Very little seems to have changed in the interim. Same as it ever was.

When Fiach MacConghail was appointed director of the Abbey in 2005, he vowed to stick to the principles of founder William Butler Yeats, in offering a mirror to its citizens, and the decision to stage Julius Caesar is particularly apt in an election year.

For director Jason Byrne, the play completes a circle of sorts.

He made his directing debut with a version of Julius Caesar for his own Loose Canon theatre company over a decade ago. Having started out as a workshop for actors it morphed into a full-scale production and from there proved to be his window into directing. Returning to it now in a major production with a cast of more than 30 actors, though, must be slightly intimidating?

"You just have to take it a step at a time and try not to look down, " he smiles.

The play has often been given a timely spin in the past. Orson Welles staged a version in the 1930s dealing with the rise of Mussolini in which the principal cast all wore fascist uniforms, and in 1968 the Royal Shakespeare Company compared Caesar to General de Gaulle. The Abbey's version sticks closer to Shakespeare's text, and the central story retains its lustre, needing no bells or whistles to be relevant and thought-provoking, concerned as it is with various factions of government politician standing on a podium and orating to the masses. "That ability to woo through words and manipulate is essentially the thing that gets you off. It's not about what's right, but who has the influence and who can pull the wool over people's eyes."

While Byrne is happy to let the audience draw their own conclusions on parallels between the play and the upcoming Irish elections, he admits that one political comparison is just staring people in the face. Bush and Blair invading Iraq is a comparable act of aggression to the assassination of Caesar, as it's a bloody and disruptive act designed to effect regime change and then what happens is a civil war. "Does anybody really think the movement into Iraq was for the good of the Iraqi people?

The Bush regime is almost overtly serving personal ambition. But I don't feel the need to get into that too much. I'm not interested in trying to say 'ladies and gentlemen, please spot the similarities' because it is there and is so blatant and obvious.

"What Shakespeare is articulating is more to do with the human element, to do with the relationships between these people, who are being hijacked by a political system or misguided. It's exposing those things, in a way, in an apolitical landscape. It's not even historical Rome, it's Shakespearian Rome, so it's further removed again. It's like a petri dish where we can look at things in isolation and examine motives and consequences.

"I mean, we could set this play in the White House, we could set it in Iraq, we could set it in the Dáil, and all right, they're not likely to jump over the benches there with dagger in hand, but they do it in other ways. Character assassination happens all the time and is part and parcel of the political arena. It's just degrees of subtlety."

While the machiavellian machinations of politics don't seem to have changed all that much in the last 400 years, it seems that we, the people, haven't gotten much savvier either, but Julius Caesar attempts to provoke as well as entertain, with the final act ideally taking place in the pub after the play.

"I think people should leave animated into discussion, " says Byrne. "The citizens of Rome are portrayed like sheep a little, but they are being manipulated. It's about what information is being filtered out. They get a slant and they go with that, and then they get a different slant and follow that one. And that's kind of how it is with us. It's like Bill Hicks said, 'Go back to sleep, here's Gladiators, watch this and shut up'. We think we're all liberated and getting the full story, but I don't think we are. Not to sound paranoid, but there's too much at stake for the people that are in power to let us know the whole story."

Same as it ever was.

William Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar', directed by Jason Byrne, opens at the Abbey on Thursday, 15 February