Word: caesares
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Shaw's Cleopatra has feline forebears. During her sixteenth year, Caesar does not, as so many critics have maintained, turn a cat into a queen (Shakespeare shows us the Queen Cleopatra); he turns an untrained kitten into a full-grown cat. Miss Nye is careful always to preserve her felinity -- through the way she lounges on the right paw of the Sphinx, indulges in catty grimaces, voices her petulant "But me! me!! me!!! what is to become of me?," plans Ftatateeta's murder with paw-like hands, and poses with crossed arms at the final fade-out. An occasional huskiness...
...Caesar of this play is the most complex and delicate character Shaw had yet created. Shaw limned for us a hero who is anti-heroic. As he said in a Note, "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it... I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him." Caesar is, as Eric Bentley astutely observed, utterly devoid of the two types of action traditionally associated with the heroes of melodrama: revenge, and erotic passion. Instead, Shaw transfers the skill in both to Cleopatra. Thus he is already playing around with his thesis that it is woman...
...Caesar coolly masterminds the whole play. Yet his statements and actions are purposefully chameleonic and inconsistent--but convincing nevertheless, when well played. Against Miss Nye's Cleopatra, the Caesar of George Voskovec is disappointing. The core of Caesar lies in the fact that whatever he says or does has no motivation other than the quite sufficient one that it is natural for this unique personage at the moment...
...conscious of Voskovec's working hard at being this Caesar. Voskovec is not natural; he is labored. Thus much of the "originality" Shaw invested him with vanishes. Voskovec speaks clearly; but clarity is not enough--effortlessness too is required. The vestiges of Voskovec's foreign accent are no hindrance in themselves; but they do perhaps account for his lines that are inflected against the sense. For Caesar everything is easy; for Voskovec everything is not easy. Hence Voskovec falls far short of Forbes-Robertson (for whom the role was written), Olivier, Cedric Hardwicke, and Claude Rains...
...main supporting roles are almost all excellently portrayed. They are easier to do, since the characters never change during the play. Only Cleopatra changes; Caesar, since he contains within him all characteristics, cannot be said to change in any essential way. Everybody else is a two-dimensional person. This would be a flaw in most plays; but not here. Shaw intentionally surrounded his two stars with people who are not original. They are fixed beings, and act only from habit or system. For Caesar (and for Shaw) such people are fools--but indisponsable all the same...