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"This Emperor Is Something to See" - Kerr on Camus' Caligula at Yale It would be easy enough to tell you about all of the spectacular things Christopher Walken is doing in the Yale Repertory Theater's new production of Albert Camus's Caligula - and they are all astonishingly right - but there are two much quieter moments that serve as vital clues to any comprehension of a bizarre emperor who was anything but mad. The first comes when a Senator, trembling for his skin as all Senators must in a world running blood, remarks that all he wants is to live his life out quietly. Mr. Walken, tall, blond, muscularly angular, a spider at most times, simply stands incredulous at the thought. The notion that any man could endure life as it is, the shabby possible, the business of getting through another day selling sham virtue like a shopkeeper, is so appalling to his sharp, unblinking intelligence that it seems to nail him to the floor. He is stunned by what passes for sanity. Later, he is about to be assassinated - there have been strangled cries from guards in the hallways, there are shadows carrying knives along the palace halls - and he knows it, is merely waiting for the inevitable. Suddenly, he sees the event as history may see it, certainly as its perpetrators pretend to see it. He manages to get a few words out. "Innocence is preparing to triumph," he says. The words so amuse him that he can scarcely contain the genuine laughter that wells up in him. He does contain it, though. His hand goes over his mouth to suppress the wild humor of the moment, the image of innocence that is itself all vanity, unreason, and blood. He holds the humor of "justice" in, because the world always will. What is so striking about these flashes is that Mr. Walken has thought himself inside Caligula instead of relying upon the stranglings, the demonic leaps, the crablike crawls that decorate the role to carry the night for him. Scarcely a line of the role passes without commanding his concentration and our attention: when he speaks of his "overcrowded solitude" or when, slaughtering men casually and without cause, he points out that "it is not necessary to have done anything to die," we see and feel the sense of what he is saying. If the possible is shoddy, the only thing for it is to bring men face to face with the impossible, even if he has to shatter all of the mirrors in which they reflect themselves to do it. Mr. Walken is not only putting on the costumes and postures of a role; he is accepting its brain. As a result, the more spectacular costumes and postures - he appears black-lipped and veiled as Venus, paints his toes with total dedication, strangles the woman he loves considerately at the moment of her greatest happiness - all come to seem appropriate, too. They are extensions of his thought, and so cannot be excesses. Mr. Walken first came to attention a few years ago in The Lion in Winter. Thereafter, his energies flagged as he tried a pallid Romeo in Canada. Now he seems to have matured overnight. His work in Caligula is cohesive and chilling in Camus's way. He makes philosophy walk. David Hurst is a first-rate foil for him as the bearded mentor/nemesis who sorely wishes that Caligula were mad; then he could be managed, it is the reasonableness that worries him. Nancy Wickwire fills in well as Caligula's aging, red-wigged, goblet-hoisting mistress, and directly Alvin Epstein must be given some share of the credit for having shaped the play's argument, through the Messrs. Walken and Hurst, so forcibly. Mr. Epstein, however, has not been able to compose his supporting players easily or plausibly; when the assorted Senators are alone onstage, they are so many togas on a rack. The key performances, and the clarity of the conundrum posed, make this Caligula something to see. - Walter Kerr |
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