The play eschews the slightest hint of a romantic relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra, a point that Shaw insisted upon. Though she frequently wounds his masculine vanity with another of the play’s running jokes-this one about Caesar’s middle-aged decrepitude-he winks toward future history like an indulgent father and promises to send Mark Antony to Egypt to satisfy her youthful craving for a Roman general with muscles. In Shaw’s scheme of things, even an incomplete version of the “new woman” must be given wide berth by a man who epitomizes the height of human achievement.īut Caesar does find Cleopatra useful.
Not that Caesar ever manages to instill in her any of his moral principles.
The greatest of Shaw’s early dramatic portraits, this Caesar is an incipient “superman” representing intellectual achievement translated into effective action.Īs for Cleopatra, she is depicted as a gullible teen-ager whose bid for the Egyptian throne is transformed from petulant wish to subtler calculation under Caesar’s tutelage. He is a man of honor, nonetheless, who confounds even his closest aides with ideas of clemency. He exalted a middle-aged, common-sense Caesar whose greatness resides in pragmatic experience modified, but not stymied, by moral compunctions. The 19th-Century tradition Shaw sought to demolish-now long since forgotten, in great part because of his success-had thrived on pomp and ceremony fueled by the artificial melodramas of fashionable playwrights such as Victorien Sardou-who drew overblown stage portraits of historical figures from Napoleon to Cleopatra-and by an abundance of worshipful Shakespearean pageants, including such favorites as “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”Īs an antidote, Shaw chose to write history as comedy. Both Caesar and Cleopatra land on the Moulton stage without benefit of parachutes, but also without archaic conceits that might have crippled the revival of a 91-year-old play. The sometimes-very-funny results have a salubrious effect perhaps not as distant from Shaw’s original intent as might be presumed.Īfter all, “Caesar and Cleopatra” was meant to bring the title characters back to earth from the pretentious heights of what Shaw called Sardoodledom and Bardolatry, to which they’d been elevated by a 19th-Century theatrical tradition that he abhored. The point is that this lavishly mounted, warmly lit, handsomely costumed Laguna production treats the play from beginning to end with a certain lightness of touch that can be suggestively illuminating. Shaw might have cringed at the liberties taken with his text, but that is not the point.
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