Word: brutus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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their unarticulated simple lust. --Dennis Brutus "A Simple Lust...
...Besides, there is a sense in which an assassination is less of an affront to morality than a kidnaping. The great man is knifed. Revenge is accomplished or unholy ambition thwarted. This is only a rerun of Julius Caesar, without the blank verse. Long live, for a time, Brutus. With kidnaping, however, you have torment direct and referred−the waiting, the humiliation, the delivery of an earlobe, the blackmail that tempts us all to wish to compromise with justice and make a fool of the law. "Free those undoubted, or figurative, criminals or we kill this figurative, or undoubted...
Furthermore, Dunlop, who has a nimble intelligence and no inconsiderable gifts in stagecraft, seems either to have missed or ignored the moral point of the play. Rome is at the flash point at which a republic blazes into tyranny. Into the crucible of history, the conspirators, and especially Brutus, pour the proposition that evil means (the assassination of Caesar) justify good ends (the preservation of the citizens' freedom). And history, time and time again, has verified the answer proffered by the play: the ends never justify the means; the means degrade and become the ends...
...Brutus is the moral core of the play, a bit of a standoffish prig, perhaps, but still unstainably idealistic. In Rene Auberjonois's handling he is merely sweatily fretful, like someone who has just received word that he is up for an IRS audit. When it comes to the lean and hungry Cassius, Richard Dreyfuss looks like someone who makes substantial midnight raids on the fridge. More pertinently, he appears as the soul of sanity, a jarringly implausible refutation of the qualities of envy, thwarted ambition and deviousness that are an intrinsic part of Cassius' makeup...
...witness the Marc Antony of Austin Pendleton. He bird-chirps the resonant oratory, and his climactic moments consist of nasal sobs. He could no more move men to mass mutiny than he could leave a scuff mark on a molehill. Alone in this whole sorry mess, Holly Villaire, playing Brutus' wife Portia, rings true, displaying a loving care, loyalty and concern for her husband that no one has shown for the play...