Caligula was among the most tyrannical and ludicrous of all Rome’s emperors. A programme note explains that he had an invasion force collect sea shells on the shore of France and tried to appoint his horse consul. In 1938, Albert Camus turned him into the dramatic protagonist in a play that looks primarily political, but has arguably more philosophical traction. What happens when an individual elevates him or herself above the rest of the species as self-appointed (self-inflicted) deity?
Its plot is truly bizarre; surely far better suited to Detlev Glanert’s opera than straightforward drama. It trumps The Master and Margarita for supernatural scale.
Caligula (Peter Coleman-Wright), missing after the death of his sister and lover Drusila, is begged to return to power by the Roman people. As emperor, he executes rivals and dissenters, raping their wives as he goes, and requesting that his citizens bring him the moon.
Which he later marries. Having been revealed as the goddess Venus and forcing everyone to workship him.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the citizens plot a cout and eventually topple him from power. His last words are: “I am still alive.”
Speaking absolutely truthfully, this was my first opera in a decade, my first ever contemporary opera and my first experience of Detlev Glanert’s music and, I found it rather a trudge as a standard watch: too slow and turgid as plot, too direct and bloated a libretto, too deliberately jarring and jaunty musically. Perhaps it takes some getting used to, but the form seems composed entirely of symbols. Its units of action are not just symbolic, they are themselves symbolised. Nothing is played. Everything is poised.
However, when it comes to the ideas contained within those symbols, Benedict Andrews’ staging is absolutely enthralling. The interplay of ideas and metaphors are incredibly dense and dextrous, enabling the piece to get beyond and beneath standard, received notions of dictatorship. Andrews lets us pick it apart and construct it afresh, shattering the hollow image for something that feels more truthful. In fact, he does so with a single image: one man and a sea of yellow seats.
There are 410 in Ralph Myers set. I counted. I had to. Partly, because of scale – it just looks so impressively monotonous. In fact, it looks bigger. At least, you process it as bigger, because you can’t help but extrapolate – ten-, twenty-, even thirtyfold – to the full stadium-size. The stage outreaches itself and dares to stand in fro something far, far bigger.
We are, of course, reflected back at ourselves by this bank of seats and yet there is an inevitable (and certainly inbuilt) layer of snobbery: our cushioned velvet against their unfussy plastic, the supposedly refined against the crass mass market. There is something passive-aggressive about their emptiness.
With the London Olympics around the corner – and all the connotations of restricted protest and security measures – what could be more potent as a symbol of dictatorship and populace than a sheer bank of stadium seating. They are blank and homogeneous, like a lobotomised, re-programmed army. What Caligula says goes. If he dons a gold wig and a spangled skirt and announces himself Venus, then he’s Venus.
Having established this, however, Andrews starts to play with the concept of the populace. The banks of seating start to fill with pop cultural figures. There are cracked beauty queens and showgirls, drenched in running mascara. It seems to run the gamut of half a century of pin-ups right up until two indentikit Nuts-like glamour models. In amongst them are cartoon characters: a distorted Mickey Mouse, a warped Kermit, He-Man and She-Ra, human junk food, Ninja Turtles, Ronald McDonald. Are they standing in for the people – the flotsam and jetsam of our collective hive mind – or are they colluding with Caligula in some way, keeping us smiling, dribbling and, to cite Bill Hicks overtly, sleeping? We realise our complicity; that of course we, together, could take him. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of us and just one of him. Caligula leads because, at some level, the people allow him to. His tyranny is, somehow, self-imposed.
Yet Caligula is also re-humanised, even as he transmogrifies into a god. “I am not lonely,” he insists, again and again, and yet, sat alone in an empty stadium, purpose-built for crowds, not individuals, he cannot really be otherwise. He has his own reflection for company; in the circular mirror that stands in for the moon and in Drusila, body-painted like a human glitterball as both ghost and reflection of the moon reflecting him in turn. Elsewhere he is entertainment, dancing before the seating bank amidst a quagmire of body bags and bouquets.
Caligula is dictator and depressive, star turn and court jester, sympathetic and monstrous; he contains his own inverse. What’s certain is that this is among the most intricate and open understandings of dictatorship you’ll see onstage. It makes Christopher Eccleston’s starched Blairite Creon at the National Theatre look a cardboard cut-out.
Photograph: Johan Persson
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