The Roman Invasion

Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus
Royal Shakespeare Company: The Aldwych
The Observer

I DID not see The Romans at Stratford last year, but I gathered from the publicity attending their transfer to the Aldwych that though the directorate intended to impose no pattern on the four plays they sort of hoped that one would emerge.

On the whole they hoped in vain; the only shape formed by this Shakespearean quartet turned out to be a downward spiral. For if these plays are to be viewed as a mirror of statecraft, their performance in chronological succession (which happens to be more or less the reverse of the order in which they were written) reveals a consistent narrowing of political scope. We begin in Coriolanus with a vibrant portrait of a city; the key to this is, maybe the tribune's rhetorical question (thunderously echoed by the populace in this production), ‘What is the city but the people?'. In Julius Caesar the light shines even clearer on individuals, but the city has begun to recede; the crowd, a dramatic antagonist in Coriolanus have shrunk to being a collective supernumerary. In Antony and Cleopatra they have vanished completely, and Rome itself is hardly more than a distant backdrop. (All critical cant to the contrary, this is as much a political play as Hamlet or Macbeth; that is to say, only marginally.)

Titus Andronicus returns us to Rome, but by now you would hardly know the place. It is in fact no longer a place, but only a symbol; the brick reality that Shakespeare found in Plutarch's chronicles has given way to the mere abstraction of Senecan theory. Characters spout Latin tags like tourists hoping to pass for natives. Within these severe limits Titus is a very good play, impeccable in its pace and logic (was not the Elizabethan phrase for a well-made play ‘as tight as Andronicus?’), but it makes a strange end to the cycle. It is so palpably an early work, and its historical basis is so slight, that we seem to have been plunged abruptly far back in time, and to be witnessing the bloody birth of a State rather than its decadence.

So what we have are just four Shakespeare productions, considerably above the recent Stratford average, though still subject to the under-casting that remains the bane of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is made all the clearer by the arrival of Nicol Williamson to play Coriolanus; his magnificent performance casts a long shadow over the other plays in which he does not appear. Like many actors in these productions he goes to emotional extremes, but he goes, it seems, of his own volition; he has not been visibly pushed there by his director.

This Coriolanus is a man whose upbringing has forced him to live unnaturally. If any. thing, Mr. Williamson goes too far in denying the few gracenotes that Shakespeare has written into his part; he manifests for example very little affection for his wife, and the love which he unquestionably feels for his mother is only an inch removed from hatred. When she sends him to make his peace with the plebeians, he goes forward with little confidence; when at the last she begs him to spare Rome, she cracks him apart. Margaret Tyzack, whose hauteur in the early scenes is somewhat forced (like her oddly pasty make-up), now flares into life; her oration is a sustained act of will, the only force capable of bending his. She has to tap the suppressed emotion of a lifetime, to burst the dam she has herself constructed. His face works for an eternity before Shakespeare's most eloquent stage-direction, 'he holds her by the hand, silent.' I have rarely known such suspense; finally and by a wonder they are no anti-climax-come the words ‘Oh mother, mother’ and the voice rises: to an agonized shout, ‘What have you done?’ The man becomes a naked boy.

The flight from human contact has hitherto been the keynote of Mr Williamson's performance. Banished from Rome, he runs out of the gate while his friends' backs are turned. The honours bestowed him at the siege of Corioli cause him to run through half a dozen shades of embarrassment; in sheer defensiveness he even makes a joke. More often he take refuge in abrasiveness; he has scarcely more patience with his own party than with the despised tribunes of the people. Mr. Williamson can sneer like nobody else, sneer passionately; certain lines (“You common cry of curs ..”) might have been written for him. His effective political neutrality chimes with Trevor Nunn's impartial direction; the consul Cominius (Nicholas Selby) and the disgruntled First Citizen (Morgan Sheppard) are allowed equal eloquence. The citizens rather puzzlingly bring the tools of their trades with them to the consular elections; here Mr Nunn is himself truckling for a critical response that will delightedly murmur ‘Brechtian' at the merest glimpse of a lathe. It spoils the flow of the scene. This week seekers after relevance should have found more nourishment in the scenes in the Volscian camp. "What good condition can a treaty find/I'th' part that is at mercy.” The lines ache.

Julius Caesar is a tidier production, glorified by a brilliant staging of the Forum scene, Brutus and Antony are spotlit for their orations; as Antony wins the crowd over and it is a seamless job in Richard Johnson's performance - they join him on stage. Earlier we have seen the murderers in revealing double focus; posing in their own imagination as saviours of their country (RSC grandiosity turned delightfully against itself) and then, after the interval, blood-boltered and thoroughly rattled. John Wood's performance of Brutus is so searching that virtually nothing of the poor man's pretensions is left standing; only his love for his wife (Miss Iyzack showing how unaffectedly fine she can be in her natural sympathetic mode) does him credit. By the close he is so deeply riven that he could almost play the quarrel scene on his own; Patrick Stewart's Cassius can hardly match him in temperament, and, like many of these actors is given to stressful pauses, often before perfectly innocuous words. Mark Dignam is Caesar, resonant and despite the abundant Fascist trimmings of the production unresolvably ambiguous.

Antony and Cleopatra is comparatively disappointing. I can never get this play together in my mind and, though Mr Nunn has scrupulously assembled all the elements, the result has less bite than Tony Richardson's comparatively slapdash production at the Bankside this summer. Vanessa Redgrave's wholehearted blowsiness seems in retrospect preferable to Janet Suzman's carefully defined sluttishness; Miss Suzman sails more logically into the death-scene, but less affectingly. Mr Johnson's mastery of Antony's public face turns out not to conceal much inner life; physically impressive (particularly in single combat) the performance is vocally and emotionally monotonous.

Mr. Nunn's triumph is Titus, played for the most part in pools of light amid engulfing darkness. The horrors have to be stylized for a modern audience, but not to the point of immobilising the play. There are mistakes here: a masked chorus that steals everybody's best lines and begins by wailing out the play's title in different keys, as if to try which sounds best, and a Tamora (Margaret Whiting) who never once touches ground (and who, having unwittingly devoured her two sons baked in a pie, demonstrates her Gothic ill-breeding by talking with her mouth full). But Mr Stewart's gleeful golliwog Aaron is his best performance, Judy Geeson is a sweet and touching Lavinia, and Colin Blakely's Titus is crumbling Rome incarnate. The downfall of his reason is beautifully marked; he congratulates his son on being banished. But this peak once passed, he lacks resource to sustain the endless blows rained upon him. Mr Nunn's ordering of the stage, his balance of ceremonial and narrative gusto, and his cultivation of a stern pity amid the savagery are admirable.

I have to add that the RSC have also to their credit an intriguing Sylvia Plath programme, well directed by Barry Kyle, at the Place; and that in the Young Vic's cheerful Much Ado About Nothing, Roy Hudd's Dogberry deserves to be written down an ass in letters of gold seven feet high.