REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on Shakespeare's mixed Roman foursome
I had hard words to say about some aspects of the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Titus Andronicus when they were offered at Stratford-upon-Avon at various times between April and October last year. I could soften some of them now, now .that all four plays — 'The Romans' — have been brought together in repertory in London at the Aldw. ych, for there are visible Improvements; but a vague hope I entertained that some dominant thematic idea would ultimately prevail, that some unifying thread of interest or purpose would become apparent, that the whole would somehow prove greater than its parts, has come to nothing.
The director, Trevor Nunn, argues a desperate case for his notion of staging the quartet as a cycle, and it is possible that, by cunning transpositions and elisions and subtle changes of emphases, he could have bent them to serve his ends; but he is defeated largely, and honourably, by his own respect for them. Only In the matter of the stage designs (by Christopher Morley) is there an overt attempt to impose upon the plays a unity they do not Possess, and that is hardly enough to bring works as violently disparate as Coriolanus and Titus plausibly within the same cycle — as though the one were the culmination of the pattern of events begun in the other — or to suggest that Antony and Cleopatra, an explosive sexual tragedy, is somehow an extension of the sophisticated political arguments and manoeuvres of Julius Caesar.
Unlike the historical cycle, 'The Wars of the Roses,' in which the RSC distinguished itself some ten Years ago, 'The Romans' is never a natural sequence of plays; its events are sometimes separated by a year or two, sometimes by centuries; it veers disturbingly from fact to fiction; and it founders dramatically on its chronology, for there is no choice but to ,end Where Shakespeare immaturely began, with the hilarious carnage of Titus, a sorry essay in Grand Guignol that has only a tenuous, not to say entirely specious. relevance to the fall of Rome.
The most striking gain since last Year's premieres is unquestionably the recruitment of Nicol Williamson. to play the title role in Coriolanus, which gives the play the centripetal power it previously lacked. Nunn was always admirably concerned to preserve the
Shakespearian balance in a work of remarkable complexity, exploring the clash of irreconcilable ideas without bias towards either patricians or plebeians. !Its essence is that Coriolanus himself is the pivot, balancing pride and arrogance, vanity and valour, a man at once insolent and sympathetic. Williamson achieves precisely that balance, his performance is massively effective, and, in the famous scene in which his mother pleads for Rome (Margaret Tyzack as Volumnia), comes within range of the greatness that Olivier touched in an earlier Stratford production of the play.
I am still generally gloomy about Julius Caesar, though John Wood has managed to subdue some of the primly spinsterish touches in his curiously neurotic Brutus, and in the quarrel scene with Cassius (Patrick Stewart) I was not quite so irresistibly put in mind of The Odd Couple. Mark Dignam's Caesar survives with
some dignity the somewhat exhausted idea of making him a sort of proto-Musso, black-clad .among the white senatorial robes, and Richard Johnson, as Mark Antony, the dashing opportunist, is already sketching in the outlines of the sardonic old rake who is later to build that pyre of passion on the Nile. At Stratford the promise thus held out was not, in the event, fulfilled; but Johnson has clearly been working on that, and he now completes the portrait with spectacular success.
In Antony and Cleopatra, indeed, I was glad to forget about Rome for a while and surrender
my interest to the tumultuous encounter of the two principals, for Janet Suzman, too, has advanced immeasurably in her portrait of the extravagantly sensual 'Egyptian dish.' She always did understand that this was a woman of rare attributes, for whose specific favours the enslaved Antony threw away a third of an empire; she now, uninhibitedly, is that woman, the lightning to his thunder. If you are to see only one play of 'The Romans,' this is the one; it has little to do with the others, or even with Rome, although the affairs of the empire impinge tiresomely from time to time. It is essentially a love story, and Johnson and Miss Suzman play it as such, remorselessly, devouringly, ferociously, a love to "let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch of the rang'd empire fall."
By the time we get to Titus Andronicus, the fall is more or less complete. The cycle has been obliged to skip the various intervening stages — the paternalism of Augustus, the lunacies of Caligula and Nero, and all the squabbles and corruption of their successors — because Shakespeare was never inspired to dramatise them. It is hard to believe that he had other than a larkish commercial purpose in taking up the Titus story — a crude catalogue of blood-letting, rape, mutilation, inadvertent cannibalism and other horrors with none of the ennobling elements of true tragedy — and he would perhaps have been even more startled than I am by the contemporary relevance that Trevor Nunn purports to find in it. The production is better than it was (it is, for major relief, considerably shorter) but it cannot do other than end the cycle on a woefully risible note.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the theatre, there are goings-on of less epic pretensions, and at the Apollo we have Frank Hauser's stylish, Oxford Playhouse production of The Wolf, a comedy by the late Ferenc Molnar, set in Budapest in 1911. It demonstrates a sprightly appreciation of the comic absurdity of jealousy, an absurdity chiefly apparent to those not afflicted. The victim here, almost inevitably, is a man of advanced middle-age who is obsessed with the idea of discovering the truth about his young wife's pre-marital association with a dashingly romantic fellow who, after seven years, has just reappeared in their lives. Leo McKern, in a marvellously apoplectic performance, builds this foolish husband into a rare buffoon, whose jealousy is a joke to be gleefully exploited.
The joke is only valid, though, if the wife is as innocent as she claims. Molnar was more cynical than that, and his comedy turns out unexpectedly as a cautionary tale less for jealous husbands than for wives who dream romantically of the might-have-been. Judi Dench plays the provocatively evasive lady; and Edward Woodward does magnificently in an astonishing variety of disguises as the man from her past who still invades her fantasies.
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