| We want the fine Arts, and their thriving use, Should make us grac'd, or favour'd of the times: We have no shift of Faces, no cleft Tongues, No soft and glutinous Bodies, that can stick, Like Snails, on painted Walls; |
To Stratford last Thursday, to see the RSC's production of Ben Jonson's, Sejanus: His Fall (text here). It's the first time I've seen it, it's the first time the RSC has staged it and, according to Michael Billington, it's rarely been revived in the last 400 years. It held me — an excellent production of a play of considerable political cynicism and savagery that speaks readily to our time.
Michael Billington (Guardian):
What is startling about the play is how it straddles three time periods. It is a neo-classic tragedy about ancient Rome. It is also rooted in Jacobean power politics and, in its study of a master-servant relationship, anticipates Volpone. Yet it is easily applicable to modern times. When Sejanus announces that the way to advance Tiberius's rule is "to present the shapes of dangers greater than they are", he speaks like a devious CIA boss. But the book-burning evokes Hitler's Germany and when Sejanus's statue is torn down we are into Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All the play lacks, apart from good female roles, is any first-hand encounter with the people themselves.
But the mastery of Doran's production lies in its blend of psychology and politics. William Houston's superb Sejanus is a pony-tailed, bisexual adventurer for whom power is the ultimate aphrodisiac: I shall long remember his triumphant leap at the prospect of becoming Tiberius's heir. With equal skill, Barry Stanton plays the emperor as a consummate political actor; stepping round a trail of blood on the senate floor, he distances himself from the violence he sanctions.
Even if virtue is marginalised, Geoffrey Freshwater, James Hayes and Nigel Cooke are outstanding as a trio of troubled patricians recalling Rome in its heyday. And both Paul Englishby's brass-filled score and Robert Jones's pillared setting evoke a world of decadence. But what truly exhilarates is the rediscovery of a play that shows Jonson's understanding of both the practical mechanics and insane corruption of power.
Dominic Cavendish has a review in the Telegraph and there's a shorter piece by Benedict Nightingale in the Times.
The King's Men performed Sejanus in 1603, Shakespeare acting in it (probably taking the role of Tiberius). The text we now have may differ from that of 1603: Jonson said 'a second pen' co-wrote some sections that he removed subsequently. A disastrous reception at the Globe was followed by official censure, the playwright being called before the Privy Council to answer charges of treason and popery. (Did this charge lead to Jonson revising the play?)
Anne Barton says: 'Tragedy normally draws in towards a centre, vested either in an individual or a family. But Sejanus flies out in all directions, providing no clearly defined focal point. … Like the comical satires, and unlike Jonson's first three Jacobean comedies, Sejanus is a large-cast play. It crowds the stage with people, many of them glimpsed only fleetingly. Major characters spring up … without warning, or abruptly disappear from view … None of these people are, in any obvious sense, humour characters. Most of them will end up dead, as opposed to being merely humiliated and disillusioned. All the same, this is tragedy only in a very special sense.'
At times closer to satire, frequently fascinated by the grotesque and savage, the play ends on a note of terrible brutality, the instigator (Tiberius) safely absent and indulging himself in Capri — and with a further cycle of betrayal and violence to come since Macro, apparently loyal to Tiberius, has aligned himself with Caligula. The distance between us and Sejanus is so different from the bond we form with Volpone, yet both plays have at their heart a master-parasite relationship (as Billington notes). Volpone grows out of Sejanus, but also marks a most significant development in Jonson's art as he came to create a focus through our 'subversive sympathy with the clever rogue' (Martin Butler, programme note).
Scene V.iv is the encounter with Fortune, the one deity Sejanus has time for. Earlier (II.ii) he had said,
'Twas only fear first in the world made gods',
but in V.i he tells Terentius, 'Her (Fortune) I, indeed, adore; / And keep her grateful image in my house'. Brilliantly directed, V.iv might have brought us at last to something of that core experience of tragedy, where men and women come face to face with forces that rule their lives. (Auden: 'We are lived by powers we pretend to understand'.) However, confronted by unfavourable signs from the goddess, Sejanus now mocks Fortune and her rites as superstition — 'juggling mystery, religion', 'cozening ceremonies' — and it doesn't come across as hubris but precisely as impatience with superstition. I think Anne Barton is right to say that in Jonson, 'such things (as the ominous signs from Fortune) become not only suspect but incipiently comic'. She goes on: 'Jonson, in this play, makes trifles of terrors instead of ensconcing himself in an unknown fear. The result is to strip away a dimension upon which most classical, as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean, tragedy had depended. For him, the very considerable horrors of Tiberius' Rome derive entirely from the brutality of the way men behave to one another, not from any sense of the mysterious workings of Fate or divine will.'
The discontinuity between Sejanus' "atheism" and his downfall, the lack of interiority (Cavendish: 'failure to establish … characters whose fates you care about'), disappoints some. I wonder … I remember that Mitterand was once asked what the most important political quality was. He replied, 'l'indifference'. Isn't part of the appeal of the play (I hope it prospers now) that it offers a view of the political world which is frightening precisely because it is presented as a world where interiority is not cultivated, where, beyond the short-term satisfaction of revenge, victims, opponents and compatriots are quickly forgotten? It's a world that's absurd, savage, repetitive, cyclical … and destined to self-consume. Unless Fortune, the one deity worth believing in (for a while), smiles on you: then, you're a successful snail, excelling at sticking on painted walls (for a while).
