Mike Poulton is a prolific, experienced
and skilled writer of stage adaptations. In fact, he can work wonders
virtually without turning a hair. Merely impossible commissions, such
as his two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall novels which the Royal
Shakespeare Company premièred not quite four years ago, he can knock
out in a jiffy. The inconceivable, like giving a similar treatment to
the intricate factionalism depicted in Robert Harris’s trilogy of
novels set in the last years of the Roman republic and centring on the
orator and politician Cicero, may take some thinking.
In fact, Poulton’s first idea in this respect is to throw away
virtually all of the first book in the trilogy... er, the one that
gives the stage version its title.
Imperium
the novel (which was followed by
Lustrum
and
Dictator) deals with
Cicero’s rise, which is dispensable as regards the greater events
portrayed, and so all we get from it is a single brief flashback scene
showing him honing his rhetorical skills as a lawyer. The story proper,
as far as we are concerned, begins with his accession to the
consulship, the highest post in the republic. Roman politicking is
complex at the best of times, so we’re given a pretty substantial intro
by the narrator of the piece, Cicero’s secretary Tiro (Joseph Kloska),
which leads even his master to interrupt with “It’s getting very
expositional...”.
Soon, though, we are into the main trajectory of Part I: Cicero’s
successful thwarting of a conspiracy led by Catiline (Joe Dixon is, as
ever, excellent at being furious) but finding himself not quite equal
to stopping the power behind Catiline, the ambitious Gaius Julius
Caesar. The first part ends with an ascendant Caesar forcing Cicero
into exile. Part II kicks off with his return just in time for the Ides
of March, siding with the assassins but, now older and less
sure-footed, finding himself serially outmanoeuvred by another Caesar,
Julius’s young heir Octavian, later the emperor Augustus.
The diptych, then, largely follows events in and around those of
Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
and
Antony And Cleopatra, and
thus reflects upon the RSC’s season of Roman plays currently
transferring from Stratford to London. Harris and Poulton’s Cicero,
too, as portrayed by the ever-admirable Richard McCabe, is not unlike a
Shakespearean tragic hero, whose distinct virtues are undermined by a
fatal flaw. In this case, his passionate attachment to republican
values (it being 450-odd years since Rome last had a king) is vitiated
by occasional political timidity and more frequent vanity, especially
after he is awarded the title “Father of the Nation” for seeing off
Catiline.
In context, we can recognise these as besetting vices in the politics
of our own age, especially when those in real power begin to exhibit
mission-creep. Frankly, Poulton and director Gregory Doran can over-egg
this aspect of matters, as when Pompey the Great appears sporting an
implausible, clearly Trumpian bouffant and declares, “I shall serve the
Senate, not dictate to it.” For me, this parallelism does not so much
clarify our own abominations through classical comparison as it
trivialises those in the plays by linking them to such obvious idiocies.
Other principal players include a majestic Peter de Jersey as Julius
Caesar, Oliver Johnstone as Octavian, Siobhan Redmond as Cicero’s often
more ramrod-backed wife and Dixon again as Mark Antony in Part II. The
linguistic idiom is contemporary and it unfolds at a reasonable pace
over six hours of playing time (plus two intervals in each of the two
parts). All in all, though, it feels less compelling than its Tudor-era
predecessor, and especially towards the end the alternation of
flippancy and sombreness threatens to become formulaic.
Written for the Financial
Times.