IMPERIUM
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 7 December, 2017
***

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

Return to index of reviews for the year 2017

Return to master reviews index

Return to main theatre page

Return to Shutters homepage