Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Des McAnuff
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 17-November 9, 2008
"Caesar in Las Vegas"
The Stratford Festival’s first-ever production of Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” is a good new/bad news situation. The good new is that Christopher Plummer, who plays Julius Caesar, gives a magnificent performance full of dry wit and capable of switching from comedy to deadly seriousness and back with the merest change of voice. The bad news is that this performance is trapped in a relentlessly superficial production by Des McAnuff with all the subtlety of a typical sword-and-sandals epic from the 1950s. The designers have pulled out so many ancient Egyptians clichés that the action seems to take place in a theme hotel in Las Vegas rather than in Egypt of circa 46BC.
As one enters the Festival Theatre one can’t help but note what appears to be a statue of an Egyptian god in gold and ebony, arms held out from its sides. Only the unobservant will thinks this is actually a statue not an actor. When the lights go down, the “statue” descends in the trap elevator and folds its arms. This pointless gimmick for an easy laugh epitomizes McAnuff’s approach to the whole play. Anyone who has seen the “Caesar” before in a good production--most likely at the Shaw Festival in 2002 or in 1983, both directed by Christopher Newton--will know that the play is not really “Monty Python’s Life of Caesar” as McAnuff portrays it. Shaw uses humour to keep us at an ironic distance from the action, not so we ignore it but so we view it rationally not emotionally. The humour significantly lessens as the play reaches it end even though McAnuff tries to keep pushing it. Shaw expects his audience to know the future history of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, if not from history then at least from Shakespeare’s plays about each figure. We should know from the start that what fate holds in store for them is not comic. The play ends with Caesar having taught the girlish Cleopatra how to be a great ruler and with him setting sail for Rome, but a good production will not view this as simple happy ending as McAnuff does but rather conjure up the bittersweet quality of triumphs that will not last.
Fortunately for the production, Christopher Plummer seems to have insulated himself from McAnuff’s superficial approach. The aged Caesar seems a role he was born to play. It suits him much better than did Lear in 2002 because it does not require the devastating baring of emotion he seemed reluctant to portray. It is also a better vehicle that was “Barrymore” in 1996 since that role afforded him no majesty. Here Plummer is both the witty commentator on himself and others and ruler whose majesty seems innate. He brings out the gravitas in Caesar’s great address to the Sphinx that begins the play then suddenly shifts to bantering with the kittenish Cleopatra as an indulgent grandfather would with the whims of his granddaughter. His command of phrase and change of tone is certainly greater than McAnuff’s. If only McAnuff were less obsessed with keeping the tone “light”, Plummer’s delivery of some of Shaw’s great insights would have greater time to register. Caesar sees that vengeance must be eschewed in politics because it leads to a cycle without end: “And so, to the end of history,
murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.”
As for Nikki M. James who plays Cleopatra, she seems to have taken to heart the universal complaints concerning the virtual inaudibility of her “Juliet” this season. Now one can hear every word, but this is because she shouts every word. She is a talented actor and could be excellent in this role, but unless she learns to project her voice properly she will ruin it. Yelling allows little room for nuance and as the play progresses nuance in her speeches becomes increasing important to let us see how she learns to play the game of politics and equivocation.
There are some excellent supporting performances, most notably Peter Donaldson as Rufio, Caesar’s main confidant and the epitome of a no-nonsense Roman soldier. Timothy D. Stickney is also a fine Pothinus, Ptolemy’s guardian and chief promoter of his cause, who at first appears untrustworthy but in fact is a canny politician. Two other important role, however, are ruined by McAnuff’s direction. Shaw clearly included the anachronistic Britannus to be an object of fun and to connect his audience with the subject matter, but Steven Sutcliffe’s fruity delivery is surely not what Shaw had in mind. One has only to think how Norman Browning played the role in 2002 to realize that Britannus is comic because of his feyness but because of a dourness that reflects his dismal native climate. Worse is McAnuff’s view of Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s chief nurse. She, too, is usually spoken of in jest because of her odd name and appearance, but unlike Britannus is she definitely not a comic character herself. McAnuff has Diane D’Aquila raise her hands and hiss like a cat whenever her name is mentioned. This only turns into a comic caricature, not the evil embodiment of the politics of revenge that Caesar is trying to ween Cleopatra from.
In smaller roles David Collins as Theodotus, Roy Lewis as Achillas and John Vickery as Lucius Septimus all do solid work. McAnuff has Paul Dunn play Ptolemy too much as a silly boy and not enough as the puppet of politicians, and Gordon S. Miller never fully conveys as Patrick R. Brown did for the Shaw that Apollodorus, another deliberately anachronistic character, is a reference to Oscar Wilde.
The best of Robert Brill’s sets is the very first when just the stone paws and suspended separate head of the Sphinx are enough to suggest the whole. Otherwise, he complies with McAnuff’s bizarre obsession with the central elevator trap and designs sets that often hamper movement and focus. In Act VI the centre is occupied with a pool where Michelle Monteith and Sophia Walker as Iras and Charmion are bathing nude. Needless to say, the gratuitous display of flesh (this is supposed to be “Cleopatra’s boudoir” not a spa) distracts us from whatever is said. Earlier in Act III, Brill has steps leading to a quay as Shaw specifies, but then, just where the pool will be, he creates a pit and through this, illogically enough, the famous carpet is unloaded not from the quayside. Are to think Apollodorus’ boat is underneath the stone barrier by the river? Later, when Caesar and others jump into the water to escape, they jump off the quayside steps and ignore the central hole. When the carpet containing Cleopatra is unrolled in the most famous scene in the play, the set allows nowhere to do it but in front of the hole onto the front steps of the stage where few people will be able to see. Later McAnuff has Brill’s two massive columns moved one in front of the other blocking the house right side of the audience from seeing the house left side. Again on the front steps of the stage where few people can see he has Rufio murder Ftatateeta. All this reveals that McAnuff in only his third production on the Festival Stage is still thinking in terms of a proscenium theatre not the thrust stage he is working with.
As for Paul Tazewell’s costumes they are almost ridiculously extravagant and with their overuse of gold lamé move the design from re-creating a period to vulgar display. Nikki M. James literally has a new costume every time she appears, even when it makes no sense. In Act III Cleopatra rushes off stage with Apollodorus’ carpet in one costume, but when she is unrolled before Caesar she is in different costume and headdress. When haste was of the essence when did she have time to change? Light designer Robert Thomson seems best at conjuring up night scenes and engineers the wonderful effect of a cascading fadeout from the perimeter moving to the centre for the play’s conclusion.
Fans of Christopher Plummer need not hesitate. This is one of the finest performances he has given at Stratford in years. It suits him so well one wonders whether he should not essay some of Shaw’s other commanding gentlemen like Undershaft in “Major Barbara” or Captain Shotover in “Heartbreak House”. Fans of Shaw, however, will balk at a production that emphasizes glitz over interpretation and comedy at all costs over the melancholy sense of the end of an era that tempers it. Christopher Newton’s 2002 production that moved the setting up to just before World War I brilliantly captured all of the play’s varied nuances and its underlying seriousness of purpose. Significantly, while McAnuff does away with Shaw’s Prologue spoken by the god Ra in keeping with his view of the play as a kind of historical comedy, Newton adapted the Prologue to emphasize from the start the Shaw’s vision of the vanity of empire. As Ra points out to Shaw’s complacent members of the British Empire, “The dust heaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust”. If only McAnuff’s production had such insight it might be worthy of Plummer’s performance.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Christopher Plummer and Nikki M. James. ©David Hou.
2008-08-20
Caesar and Cleopatra