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Caesar and Cleopatra

The lack was the shortage of manpower. Maybe it is carping to regret the minute size of the Roman army; perhaps we shouldn't have found our imagination straining a little to picture the Roman thousands behind the actual three. Not that mere numbers and show can make the scene real (the Repertory "Devil's Disciple" proved that) but it might have helped the illusion along a bit. The Concert Chamber stage is not a large one and, all in all, Unity did, we suppose, quite creditably with the men and space at their disposal to suggest the vastness of the deserts and the actual hordes of soldiers. We still regret (even making this concession) the trio's "Hail Caesar" at odd intervals: it reminded us too much of the Ja-Oui-Si trio in this year's Extrav.

The real fault was Cleopatra.

As we read Shaw, Cleopatra was designed as a kitten—amoral, a fluffy little schoolgirl. Robin King made her rather a cat. The over stridency of the voice was a large factor in this grating fault: and later when she was supposed to be growing up, her behaviour was less like the sudden vicious stroke of a kitten getting powerful than the charming irrelevancy of a St. Trin-ian schoolgirl's shooting. With experience, she should improve a lot, once she loses the tendency to think the Concert Chamber as large as the Town Hall.

Shaw's title is, anyway, rather misleading. He isn't much concerned really with Cleopatra, except insofar as she makes the character of Caesar clearer to understand (and one could well argue that he isn't interested in the character of Caesar except insofar as he makes the character of Shaw easier to understand).

It is difficult to see how John MacDonald could have improved on his Caesar. The exact spirit of Shaw is often hard to get over: the right mixture of pungency with gentleness, the right proportions of paradox and simplicity and almost inhuman clarity of thought—these are hard to portray, and the more so when one is, at the same time, acting in a part a good twenty years older than one is. This was a Caesar in the true Shavian spirit. The climax, in the fourth act, was taken with remarkable case yet with a force which got the point of the whole play home: those few lines are as powerful as anything Shaw wrote, and John MacDonald put them over.

An almost perfect foil (and a perfect bit of casting) was the selection of John Bullock for Ruflo. Again in the exact spirit of the play, Ruflo was a delightful character. The only other one to come up to the rightness of this casting was George Eiby's Brittanus—a most fantastical character really, when one sees the middle class smugness of an Englishman among the pomp and finery of Egypt. Apollodorus was good, and looked the part: Ftatateeta, on the other hand (perhaps by contrast with one's memory of Flora Robson's film role) was not quite vicious enough.

The play started rather weakly with a poor selection of unimposing voices coming out of the gloom of the courtyard scene: but in spite of the rapid scene changing and the necessary long breaks at the beginning, it held attention thereafter, and climaxed properly in the fourth act. The scantness of the crowd in the final act was something of a comedown. On the whole, it succeeded: on Egyptian setting was a genuine excuse to go to town on the sets: this Colleen Renner did' with a great deal of skill and effect.

Unity certainly appears to be strength, though not in strength.

—J.C.