Claudius? Is it You?

HBO’s Rome played to great acclaim lately on the big screen at Il Teatro Buce, so we decided we’d take a flutter on “the rest of the story”—I Claudius¸ first aired on PBS back in 1976. Mrs. B says she saw a few episodes in the first run; I had never seen it at all.

And? Well, have you ever heard the insight that historical novels date more quickly than others because when you are reaching to depict another time, you always load up on unconscious anachronisms that are more glaring than they would be when you were just trying to be yourself? Think George Eliot’s Romola—a pretty good novel, actually, once you get past the Victorian tracery that obscures her best efforts to display Renaissance Florence, but very near comic if you let the tracery get in your way. So here: Derek Jacoby survives pretty well as Claudius, the dictator with the speech defect and the limp. But the rest of the cast sounds like nothing so much as a vintage sitcom. Think The Honeymooners, think The Flintstones—heck, think he Simpsons, the sitcom’s sitcom par excellence. It’s the dialog, partly—these Romans talk back to each other, they banter, they do all the things the sitcom writers used to do to beguile the odd half hour. And the casting: Rome’s Augustus was lean, and mostly mean. In Claudius, he sounds like nobody so much as Barney Rubble, or Ralph Kramden himself (“one of these days, Livia, pow, right in the kisser!”).

Claudius has another problem, pitted against Rome: it looks cheap. No wonder: they say Rome cost $100 million. I haven’t any idea what Claudius cost, but it pretty clearly wasn’t in the same league. Virtually all the sets are indoors. When they want to do what might laughingly be described as a “crowd scene”—well, early on, there is a bit where Livia chooses to face down “the Roman mob.” The “mob” turns out to be a couple of dozen guys with their backs to the cameras, yelling and flailing while camped in between two walls about 15 feet apart, so as to create the illusion of too many people for the space. It’s a stitch. So also the “gladiator” scene in a later episode. Livia delivers a queenly lecture to a dozen or so guys with hangdown manners and swords. Then she repairs to her throne and gets on with her royal conversation, while we listen to an offstage chorus of clank, clank.

For all of this, Claudius actually turns out to be good fun. The writers obviously worked over their Suetonius and Tacitus with great care, and have done their best to tease out the naughty bits (though inevitably, more prim and restrained than we we would expect today). Strong, crude plot line; plenty of intrigue and betrayal, and a camp hoot. I just hate to think what Rome will look like to the critic of 2040.