Decline & Fall

Romulus (by Friedrich Duerrenmatt, adapted by Gore Vidal) promises, initially, to be a dramatic elegy, a dryly urbane fable of the organic decline and fall of a civilization. The hero Romulus (Cyril Ritchard) is the last Caesar of Rome. He is a former history professor ("I am what I used to teach") who married the previous emperor's daughter Julia (Cathleen Nesbitt), but the year is now A.D. 476 and the Goths have a rendezvous with his destiny. While his wife, daughter, generals and bureaucrats prate of "the international menace of Gothicism," Romulus sits amid the chipped columns and molting gold eagles of his villa and lifts a finger only to curl it elegantly around a goblet of wine. He seems like a philosopher-king. On the one hand, echoing Voltaire's "We must cultivate our garden," Romulus raises chickens, and his royally named brood includes Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic. On the other, with a touch of Spenglerian fatalism, Romulus accepts a tide of history that cannot be turned and must be endured. He represents reality, however disenchanted, confronting the illusions, however gallant, of those around him who talk emptily about saving Rome.

If the first act seems to veil a point of view under a comic mask ("He who is last had best laugh"), the second and last act strips away the mask to make points in dead, and deadly, earnest. Romulus reveals to his wife that he has followed a purposeful plan of inaction. He is really a judge-penitent. He has judged Rome to be corrupt; hastened its fall, and hopes to expiate its sins by dying under the Gothic sword. Ottaker (Howard Da Silva), "the Gothic butcher," appears. As a barbarian, he scarcely lives up to his advance publicity. Like later German tourists, he is a devotee of classicism and omniyorously well read on Roman culture and art objects ("I congratulate you on your Venus. An original signed by Praxiteles"). He upsets Romulus dreadfully by sinking to his knees in fealty. To Ottaker the evils of Roman rule are negligible, and he is horrified by his nephew Theodoric's fanatic nationalist ambition of leading the Goths to future blood baths of glory. When they discover that they are fellow chicken fanciers, Romulus and Ottaker quickly sit down to a sensible man's summit conference. "We were both wrong," says Romulus. "I have no power over the past. And you have none over the future. We are shipwrecked forever in the present." And for the present, they decide to make the world "safe to breed chickens from one end of Europe to the other."

As a theater piece Romulus owes a calculable debt to Cyril Ritchard, who makes of the emperor a mock-serious dandy, and whose drolly mannered and expertly timed delivery accounts for most of the evening's laughs. Playwright Vidal's contribution to the Duerrenmatt script seems to consist of topical gags scavenged from the headlines without any visible link to the historic past. Romulus asks finally to be judged as a play of ideas when it only toys with ideas. Overlooking the fact that it takes two to make dialogue but only one to make war, Romulus clings to the naively optimistic argument that if only opposing parties will sit around a table and talk, the threat of war will vanish from the world. Another of the play's shallower notions is that the present is an isolated moment in time, and somehow contains within itself the principles of sound action. Yet wise policy must proceed from a knowledge of the past coupled with plans and hopes for the future.

Trying desperately to be Shavian, Romulus in the end rewards the playgoer with a wispy heap of intellectual shavings.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.