Platonic Exercise

By Gerald Clarke

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise."

An imaginative production might have rescued the good and masked the bad in this 80-year-old drama. Director Ellis Rabb reverses that equation, how ever; his Caesar and Cleopatra is as dull as it is dutiful. Scenes change with astonishing rapidity, but the action seems regulated by an hourglass -- an illusion whose secret is best left with Rabb and the Sphinx. Ironically, the one liberty the director has taken, a vigorous pruning to keep the play within two hours, makes Shaw's needlessly complicated plot simply baffling.

The scenery and the costumes, which cost $300,000, are a dazzling plus. But the acting is, surprisingly, no more than competent. Elizabeth Ashley is a vital Cleopatra -- half alley cat, half Queen -- but more Shakespeare's lady of the Nile than Shaw's. Rex Harrison's Caesar is a burnt-out case who does not seem to remember what it was like to be warm -- let alone what it was like to be Caesar. Gerald Clarke

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