'Caesar & Cleopatra' at Stratford

No: not Antony and Cleopatra, but Caesar and Cleopatra has just joined the repertory of the American Shakespeare Festival--which thus, for the first time in its history, has staged a non-Shakespearean work (of this departure more anon).

Though Shaw would later surpass it three or four times, Caesar and Cleopatra (written in 1899) found him first hitting his major stride; consequently it is his first really great play. It is the middle one of three related "Plays for Puritans," as Shaw called them--flanked by The Devil's Disciple and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, both considerably inferior.

Shaw subtitled this comedy "A History Lesson." He was already firmly entrenched in his favorite role of being the educator-entertainer. He was not, however, presenting himself as one of the scholar-professors (though he intuitively knew more than most of these); he felt no obligation to stick to all the historical facts, nor even to ferret them all out in the first place. Nor did he hesitate to fill the play with anachronisms, thereby incurring the wrath of a host of commentators (most of whom, however, would not dream of criticizing Shakespeare for including clock-strikings in Jullus Caesar and billiards in Antony and Cleopatra).

The anachronisms are, in fact, an intentional part of Shaw's "Lesson." For him, the present was the past. Shaw put it explicitly in a second prologue that he wrote in 1912 in the form of a sermon delivered by the god Ra to the audience: "Men twenty centuries ago were already just such as you, and spoke and lived as ye speak and live, no worse and no better, no wiser and no sillier." And in a postscriptal Note to the play Shaw said, "The notion that there has been any ... Progress since Caesar's time ... is too absurd for discussion" (but he goes on to discuss it anyhow).

Shaw was also teaching a lesson about war. He has Caesar proclaim: "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." And the second Prologue warns: "I bid you beware, ye who would all be Pompeys if ye dared; for war is a wolf that may come to your own door." Like many great creative artists, Shaw could sense the course of world events some years ahead; he foresaw World War I and its wake, just as Mahler did in his symphonies at the same time.

Another of Shaw's targets in this play has receded from view a good deal since his day: the Victorian melodrama. But Shaw, as a practicing drama reviewer in the 1890's, was fed up to the gills with this type of play. In Caesar and Cleopatra (as well as the other two "Puritan" plays) he was poking fun at this genre and pulling the pedestal out from under the Romantic hero. The play is, then--if I may run the risk of Polonius' excessive categorization--an example of the didactic parody - melodrama. Brilliant comedy, epigrammatic wit, and hectic melodrama are here in abundance--but all in the service of solid intellectual ideas.

The current production is a visual delight throughout. Lloyd Burlingame has devised a versatile megalithic set of steps and blocks that are easily moved on rollers, and has designed a handsome wardrobe of costumes. Gilbert Hemsley has provided beautiful lighting without being fussy; and Herman Chessid's incidental music is better than he has provided for the Shakespeare plays--especially noteworthy is the harp and flute music that perfectly evokes the desert atmosphere around the big Sphinx.

Yet the trimmings have not turned the show into an extravaganza, which is what would have resulted if all of Shaw's directions had been followed exactly. Even if these excessive directions were an intentional part of his parody, it is wise to modify them; otherwise no Caesar--not even the real one--could survive amid the morass of spectacle.

The director is Ellis Rabb, who was himself one of the Festival's finest character actors a few seasons ago. He has elicited bright and vigorous performances from most of his players, and his blockings are unfailingly attractive (though he should have got the cast to agree on the pronunciation of the vowels in Cleopatra's name).

What Rabb cannot be forgiven is his periodic snipping of the text and his wholesale excision of the Prologue scene. The resulting running-time is barely more than two hours--far below maximum tolerance. The fact that Shaw wrote an alternative Prologue-sermon thirteen years later does not vitiate the importance of the original Prologue.

Not only is this Prologue a wonderfully funny scene in itself, but it is also necessary to the form and the full meaning of the play. Furthermore, it is needed to build up in the minds of the audience a picture of Caesar and his legions as nothing better than the awful Anthropophagi that Othello mentions. Otherwise the ironic effect of Caesar's first entrance is nullified; and the audience, let in on a secret, cannot properly appreciate Cleopatra's experience of going through a similar anxiety and discovery in the ensuing scenes.

And--as a purely practical concern--by starting the performance with Caesar's apostrophe to the Sphinx, Rabb has guaranteed that this great poetic aria will be ruined by the scramble of late comers to their seats.

The final irony of all this is that Shaw himself fought a ferocious and unflagging battle against the total tribe of text trimmers.

The prime virtue of this production is the Cleopatra of Carrie Nye. As she is made up, she looks surprisingly like our current screen Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor; and she has the added advantage of acting ability. Miss Nye can take her place beside her distinguished predecessors in the role--Gertrude Elliott, Lilli Palmer, and Vivien Leigh.

Shaw's Cleopatra has feline forebears. During her sixteenth year, Caesar does not, as so many critics have maintained, turn a cat into a queen (Shakespeare shows us the Queen Cleopatra); he turns an untrained kitten into a full-grown cat. Miss Nye is careful always to preserve her felinity -- through the way she lounges on the right paw of the Sphinx, indulges in catty grimaces, voices her petulant "But me! me!! me!!! what is to become of me?," plans Ftatateeta's murder with paw-like hands, and poses with crossed arms at the final fade-out. An occasional huskiness in her vocal delivery suggests she may even have furballs inside her.

The Caesar of this play is the most complex and delicate character Shaw had yet created. Shaw limned for us a hero who is anti-heroic. As he said in a Note, "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it... I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him." Caesar is, as Eric Bentley astutely observed, utterly devoid of the two types of action traditionally associated with the heroes of melodrama: revenge, and erotic passion. Instead, Shaw transfers the skill in both to Cleopatra. Thus he is already playing around with his thesis that it is woman who pursues man, not the other way around--a theme he would later treat in full, notably in Man and Superman.

Caesar coolly masterminds the whole play. Yet his statements and actions are purposefully chameleonic and inconsistent--but convincing nevertheless, when well played. Against Miss Nye's Cleopatra, the Caesar of George Voskovec is disappointing. The core of Caesar lies in the fact that whatever he says or does has no motivation other than the quite sufficient one that it is natural for this unique personage at the moment.

But we are too conscious of Voskovec's working hard at being this Caesar. Voskovec is not natural; he is labored. Thus much of the "originality" Shaw invested him with vanishes. Voskovec speaks clearly; but clarity is not enough--effortlessness too is required. The vestiges of Voskovec's foreign accent are no hindrance in themselves; but they do perhaps account for his lines that are inflected against the sense. For Caesar everything is easy; for Voskovec everything is not easy. Hence Voskovec falls far short of Forbes-Robertson (for whom the role was written), Olivier, Cedric Hardwicke, and Claude Rains.

The main supporting roles are almost all excellently portrayed. They are easier to do, since the characters never change during the play. Only Cleopatra changes; Caesar, since he contains within him all characteristics, cannot be said to change in any essential way. Everybody else is a two-dimensional person. This would be a flaw in most plays; but not here. Shaw intentionally surrounded his two stars with people who are not original. They are fixed beings, and act only from habit or system. For Caesar (and for Shaw) such people are fools--but indisponsable all the same.

Rosemary Murphy, with a green dress and long platinum hair, and decked out with jewels and bangles, is an ominously loyal Ftatateeta, Cleopatra's chief nurse. As the King's guardian Pothinus, potbellied Patrick Hines is admirably sly and nasty. Philip Bosco is the brusque and exuberant Roman officer at Caesar's side. Richard Woods, with the prescribed blue garb and drooping mustache, is hilarious as Caesar's English secretary Britannus; he is stuffily Macmillanesque as he spouts such things as Disraell's "peace with honor."

Frank Converse is a properly handsome Achillas, but he speaks poorly. Young and dashing James Ray, dressed in blue and gold, is just right for Apollodorus, the aesthetics-minded carpet dealer whose motto is "Art for Art's sake." Nicholas Martin tries hard to be the insipid Ptolemy; but it is ridiculous to cast a grown man as a ten-year-old brat--King he may be, Canute he is not.

Having said all this about Caesar and Cleopatra, I feel compelled to protest its appearance at a "Shakespeare Festival." The American Shakespeare Festival was founded with the single purpose of mounting the plays of Shakespeare; this is what it has done for eight years, and this is what it should do for the next eighty.

It is not as though there weren't enough plays to go around. Even if, as during this season, it is found feasible to present four instead of three plays, the Shakespearean canon is still sufficiently large. Can we not stand even Shakespeare's lesser works at least once a decade?

Now I am well aware that Shaw was constantly proclaiming himself a dramatist far superior to Shakespeare. I am also aware that the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario has broadened its offerings to include Oedipus Rex, Cyrano de Bergerac, and H.M.S. Pinafore. I am a great admirer of Sophocies, Rostand, and Gilbert & Sullivan; but their place is not at a Shakespeare festival.

I suppose the Connecticut Stratfordians thought the Shaw play a valid choice since the title characters were both treated by Shakespeare. But where is this to end? Shall we in future find them putting on Kiss Me, Kate and The Boys From Syracuse? And then Elmer Rice's Hamlet-based Cue for Passion, with afternoon showings of the movie Joe Macbeth?

Surely Shakespeare's own oeuvre can support an institution unaided. If not, then let the Festival cease parading under a false name. Let it become, say, the American Festival of Playwrights Whose Names Begin with S-H-A. Then it can offer not only Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw but also Irwin Shaw and Shairp and Shakhovsky and Shadwell. But when a so-called American Shakespeare Festival puts on Caesar and Cleopatra, the proper comment can only be "Pshaw!