I, Claudius

MASTERWORK

The virtual continuum of time is obviously television’s greatest asset and when used right, and beyond the “it’s happening now” news events, the miniseries format brings to us things the other mediums can only dream about. The wide screen spectaculars about ancient Rome, for example, are almost always dress-ups abbreviating epochal events and scandals. With the box, we can really get into the nitty gritty of lascivious Rome: as the art form’s first masterpiece, I, Claudius is still unequaled as there are no land or sea battles to endure, no gargantuan pageantry or sets or casts of thousands; we’re taken right into the minds and politically and sexually motivated deeds of the Roman elite and hangers-on and stay there. (HBO’s Rome owes a lot to it.) So private a view of history we often feel like voyeurs—very willing ones, not unlike the way the Family Wallace make us enjoy being peeping Toms with The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People.

The benefits of the miniseries afford actors the chance to re-create historical figures in a way more fully realized than radio, theatre and movies can match. Creating the famous who can’t be traced from the omnipresent media also gives performers the edge: Jacobi in I, Claudius (ditto Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R) can bring the personage to embodied life without relying on lip-synching the obligatory historical events and chatter. At his beginning, Jacobi disquiets viewers with his Claudius stammering, squinting, twitching, shaking, fumbling and limping—probably the manifestations of cerebral palsy. Then, watching him grow from presumed idiot child to master politician reigning as emperor for 14 years, we feel not only does history come satisfyingly alive but this portrayal, as well as Jackson’s, is art. His Claudius is wrought from an actor out to get it right without ego interfering: with Claudius’s illness having all the signs of the Gods looking down upon him unfavorably, he’s perpetually treated as fool, with contempt and disgust, even by his own mother. The character is a pinnacle of irony—only those not plotting, murdering, backstabbing for power sense Claudius’s potential and the attributes saving him. So busy are the gaggles of poisoners, betrayers and practitioners of selective familicide they don’t see until it’s too late the damnation inherent in their assumptions. The initial difficulties Jacobi had in roping in the character don’t linger in the way Charles Laughton’s did; expressing anxieties in not getting the hobbled gait and stuttering of Claudius to work—revealed in sequences from the unfinished 1937 I, Claudius available in the documentary The Epic That Never Was—reflect both his and director Josef von Sternberg’s quiet relief over the production’s cancellation after a month of shooting when co-star Merle Oberon (as Messalina) suffered facial injuries in a car accident.

Academicians argue against seeing an adaptation of a respected piece of literature before reading as it mares a reader’s ability to envision for himself the characters, the atmosphere, the purposes. True if movie or TV versions are abject and we haven’t consciously avoided their ubiquitous viewings. When adaptations are crafted with high guardianship, and in this regard the British show the deepest genuflection to literature, the opposite may be truer. Reading the Robert Graves books on which the series is based before seeing it can leave us iced—treading on enormous assemblages of facts, factoids and gossip freezing the “human” out of the historic figures. Jack Pulman’s adaption of I, Claudius, wittingly directed by Herbert Wise, is doubtless the most literate teleplay ere The Jewel in the Crown, the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice and the American John Adams and is itself the best argument to see Derek Jacobi first before plowing into Graves; we have the intimate guide right there to get us through all that’s been left out. When getting to the dirty deeds of long-armed Livia as Graves describes, Siân Phillips, the other acting triumph, is there to help make them more treacherous and vile. A book can do justice to evil Livia learning the methods of poisoning from the corpulent brewmeister but it can’t show her facial fluctuations (or Claudius’s symptoms) in the way the series does, or sense her hand moving towards the crotch of a favored spy, or listen to her confess her most grievous crimes to Claudius, or hear her deathbed pleading to Claudius and Caligula to make her a goddess to save her from Hell. During the filming of the first episode, Wise and Phillips would look at each other with trepidation—she wasn’t getting Livia, she wasn’t acting appositely as one of history’s most alleged murderous wives and mothers. Wise suggested she be less ingratiating and not be afraid of camp; succeeding in correcting the former, she’s alarming and cagey and full speed ahead in discharging Pulman’s serpent’s tooth humor.

For I, Claudius, Wise uses videotape to transform the box’s deficiency of size into a compensatory amplification of intimacy. He and camera operator Peter Hider have achieved a mastering of tape’s “live” look by calibrating the closeups of performers, allowing for a startling result: a 2˝-D kind of theatrical effect occurs as the actors jump out at us—Jacobi’s Claudius seems to belong exclusively to the viewers because he’s “live” up front against the mouth-watering murderousness; John Hurt’s Caligula disemboweling his sister; Sheila White’s champion whore Messalina getting it real good in more ways than one. At the same time Wise and Hider quell the often irksome tape process’s built-in danger of dullifying or intensely falsifying sets: Tim Harvey’s richly detailed designs and appointments stay in the background as curious stylization, under a variety of lighting, with a penchant for noirish shadows, by John Green. (Credits don’t list a “director of photography.”)

Some historians and British critics at first attempted to prove they knew more about Rome than Robert Graves (who openly opined they knew much less than most others) or adapter Pulman: they disputed Livia’s methods of poisoning; they pooh-poohed Caligula’s psychotic murder of his wife-sister or making his horse a member of the Senate; they challenged Claudius’ wife Messalina’s sexcapades and the depiction of Claudius’ death. What’s lacking from these experts is anything substantial to counter the series’ enactments of intent; they even sound a little shaky about their own scholarship, as in fact they should because we still don’t know the facts in these examples. They had wanted to dismiss with the slight of condescension the right of first rate dramatists to collate events into probabilities and possibilities, but soon these carpers were humbled by enthusiastic public support for the show and face-savingly altered their original views. (Reminders: the ivy-towered Western whites who remained adamant in claiming Cleopatra was drug-addled sex fiend have reversed course; many art historians asserting Michelangelo’s assumed celibacy, ignoring his masturbatory proclivities thru his artistry and personal letters, sound naďve.) Graves didn’t write from a vacuum: he used Claudius’s known history as basis, sought confirmation from, among many, the gossips Suetonius and Josephus, and from Gibbon. Faithful to Graves, who liked the minseries, Pulman goes one steep step further—injecting into the series the eternally infectious virus of evil behavior otherwise to be excused as treatable malady. In this masterwork, Pulman aims straight at the heart of the feverous darkness residing in ourselves.

In 2002, BBC gathered director Herbert Wise and members of the cast in “I, Claudius — A Television Epic” for their comments on its 25th anniversary. With Jacobi, Phillips, Hurt (never looking better), Margaret Tyzack (Antonia), Brian Blessed (Augustus) and George Baker (Tiberius). Click second poster down at left. The BBC/12 Episode miniseries at 669 Minutes available on DVD and YouTube.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com