The Caesar of this play is the most complex and delicate character Shaw had yet created. Shaw limned for us a hero who is anti-heroic. As he said in a Note, "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it... I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him." Caesar is, as Eric Bentley astutely observed, utterly devoid of the two types of action traditionally associated with the heroes of melodrama: revenge, and erotic passion. Instead, Shaw transfers the skill in both to Cleopatra. Thus he is already playing around with his thesis that it is woman who pursues man, not the other way around--a theme he would later treat in full, notably in Man and Superman.

Caesar coolly masterminds the whole play. Yet his statements and actions are purposefully chameleonic and inconsistent--but convincing nevertheless, when well played. Against Miss Nye's Cleopatra, the Caesar of George Voskovec is disappointing. The core of Caesar lies in the fact that whatever he says or does has no motivation other than the quite sufficient one that it is natural for this unique personage at the moment.

But we are too conscious of Voskovec's working hard at being this Caesar. Voskovec is not natural; he is labored. Thus much of the "originality" Shaw invested him with vanishes. Voskovec speaks clearly; but clarity is not enough--effortlessness too is required. The vestiges of Voskovec's foreign accent are no hindrance in themselves; but they do perhaps account for his lines that are inflected against the sense. For Caesar everything is easy; for Voskovec everything is not easy. Hence Voskovec falls far short of Forbes-Robertson (for whom the role was written), Olivier, Cedric Hardwicke, and Claude Rains.

The main supporting roles are almost all excellently portrayed. They are easier to do, since the characters never change during the play. Only Cleopatra changes; Caesar, since he contains within him all characteristics, cannot be said to change in any essential way. Everybody else is a two-dimensional person. This would be a flaw in most plays; but not here. Shaw intentionally surrounded his two stars with people who are not original. They are fixed beings, and act only from habit or system. For Caesar (and for Shaw) such people are fools--but indisponsable all the same.

Rosemary Murphy, with a green dress and long platinum hair, and decked out with jewels and bangles, is an ominously loyal Ftatateeta, Cleopatra's chief nurse. As the King's guardian Pothinus, potbellied Patrick Hines is admirably sly and nasty. Philip Bosco is the brusque and exuberant Roman officer at Caesar's side. Richard Woods, with the prescribed blue garb and drooping mustache, is hilarious as Caesar's English secretary Britannus; he is stuffily Macmillanesque as he spouts such things as Disraell's "peace with honor."

Frank Converse is a properly handsome Achillas, but he speaks poorly. Young and dashing James Ray, dressed in blue and gold, is just right for Apollodorus, the aesthetics-minded carpet dealer whose motto is "Art for Art's sake." Nicholas Martin tries hard to be the insipid Ptolemy; but it is ridiculous to cast a grown man as a ten-year-old brat--King he may be, Canute he is not.

Having said all this about Caesar and Cleopatra, I feel compelled to protest its appearance at a "Shakespeare Festival." The American Shakespeare Festival was founded with the single purpose of mounting the plays of Shakespeare; this is what it has done for eight years, and this is what it should do for the next eighty.

It is not as though there weren't enough plays to go around. Even if, as during this season, it is found feasible to present four instead of three plays, the Shakespearean canon is still sufficiently large. Can we not stand even Shakespeare's lesser works at least once a decade?

Now I am well aware that Shaw was constantly proclaiming himself a dramatist far superior to Shakespeare. I am also aware that the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario has broadened its offerings to include Oedipus Rex, Cyrano de Bergerac, and H.M.S. Pinafore. I am a great admirer of Sophocies, Rostand, and Gilbert & Sullivan; but their place is not at a Shakespeare festival.

I suppose the Connecticut Stratfordians thought the Shaw play a valid choice since the title characters were both treated by Shakespeare. But where is this to end? Shall we in future find them putting on Kiss Me, Kate and The Boys From Syracuse? And then Elmer Rice's Hamlet-based Cue for Passion, with afternoon showings of the movie Joe Macbeth?

Surely Shakespeare's own oeuvre can support an institution unaided. If not, then let the Festival cease parading under a false name. Let it become, say, the American Festival of Playwrights Whose Names Begin with S-H-A. Then it can offer not only Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw but also Irwin Shaw and Shairp and Shakhovsky and Shadwell. But when a so-called American Shakespeare Festival puts on Caesar and Cleopatra, the proper comment can only be "Pshaw!