ARTicles vol.5 i.3a: “Rome” in Small Letters

In Britannicus private passion becomes public scandal. The Emperor eavesdrops on intimate conversations, and his jealousy destabilizes Roman politics. Director Robert Woodruff believes that the play’s themes of surveillance and deception resonate deeply with contemporary American society. Woodruff uses the control Nero wields over his subjects to draw our attention to the power we grant our own political leaders through passive consent.

A slogan painted across the back of the stage proclaims, “Empire creates its own reality.” This paraphrases a statement Woodruff heard from a spokesman for the Bush administration. The public, Woodruff says, has “been at the mercy of this administration’s truth.” Whether in ancient Rome or contemporary Washington, he argues, the egos and vendettas of the powerful few have repercussions for the whole world: “We’re living out the consequences of that penetration of the private into public and the public into private.” Recent wiretapping scandals and Homeland Security intrusions into the private lives of citizens have influenced Woodruff’s vision of the play. Additionally, he believes the President has a personal vendetta about Saddam Hussein’s attempted assassination of George H.W. Bush and that this influenced the invasion and occupation of Iraq. These current events remind Woodruff of the cycles of deception and vendettas in Rome. “The rules of civilization are thin,” Woodruff argues. “The separation between personal ego and public policy: the boundary is almost nonexistent.”

Together with set designer Riccardo Hernandez, Woodruff has created an environment for the play in which the boundaries between public and private are fragile. A delicate structure center stage offers the characters fleeting moments of shelter from Nero’s spies, cameras and technicians. Hernandez has created a set made out of literal boundaries that seem in constant danger of disintegrating. The characters periodically seek shelter in the small enclosure onstage, but Hernandez has constructed its walls of thin plastic membranes and narrow blinds that may be opened or drawn back. Light can invade the space and illuminate the figures inside, and the room itself becomes a projection surface for film that Nero shoots of the court’s activities.

Early on, the designer and director discussed the structure of the shelter as a triptych. The frequent use of that shape in visual art appealed to Woodruff; he was also intrigued by its similarity to a bank of surveillance monitors. Woodruff points out that the triptych is an iconic filmmaking device. From the silent movies of Sergei Eisenstein to the Woodstock documentary of 1970, film editors have used a split screen to indicate simultaneous action in multiple locations that the human eye cannot ordinarily capture. This device underlines Nero as master puppeteer of court politics.

Woodruff has made his Nero a filmmaker because, he says, “Shooting a film is voyeuristic and egoistic.” The spectacle of Nero’s orchestrating the shooting and mixing of footage indicates his control over events onstage and their representation. Nero imposes his misrepresentation not only on his courtiers, but also on his subjects, and his distortions become public policy. Woodruff envisions the lives of the characters happening in and around the central enclosure; this room either keeps them boxed into a space that promises safety and privacy, or expands to allow the play’s cast, crew and audience to violate its boundaries. For the majority of the show, Woodruff sees Nero as the mastermind of this assault on privacy. “Nero is the autocratic figure behind the theatrical event,” he says. “But at some point he’ll lose control of it.”

Racine constructs the majority of the play as seemingly private conversations in which two characters confide in each other and a third character listens in. By allowing Nero to shoot the other characters on film, Woodruff and Hernandez throw this pattern of surveillance into high relief. The director points out that, like Nero, the audience members are voyeurs. But while they also have a privileged view of the action, they cannot control it the way Nero does.

One of the most powerful moments of eavesdropping occurs between Nero’s stepbrother Britannicus and the princess Junia. Jealous of Junia’s affection for Britannicus, Nero has kidnapped her. Nero also knows that if the lovers marry, they will form an alliance with a stronger claim to the throne than his. Britannicus and Junia share a brief scene together onstage. Before they meet, Nero tells Junia that he will be watching her. If she betrays the slightest hint of her love for Britannicus, Nero will order his assassination. Britannicus, unaware that the Emperor is listening, searches in vain for some sign of Junia’s loyalty. But paralyzed by her fear of Nero, she rejects Britannicus in order to save him.

In other productions of the play, this famous scene has prominently featured Nero as a silent presence ominously looming over the lovers. But Woodruff takes the opposite approach. He wants the audience, like Junia, to spend the scene wondering where Nero is and how much he hears. Living in a world of spies means never knowing when or how someone is watching. Although the audience shares Nero’s voyeurism, they have no power to prevent his vengeful acts. Woodruff says that the audience watches Nero in the same way that we watch contemporary leaders: from a position of passive acceptance. “We watch power pass,” he says. “The only thing that holds the government together is our consent. We empower leaders, and I don’t think we take advantage of that enough.”

The director credits the designer for an environment that will allow Nero’s actions to be overpowering and unpredictable to his court. “The great thing that Riccardo has contributed,” he explains, “is the sense of compression: he’s turned “Rome” in capital letters into “Rome” in small letters. It’s a private, intimate, personal setting, until the space opens up at the end, and the nature of Nero’s power shifts.” Woodruff still hasn’t decided how this shift will be realized onstage. Perhaps Rome will burn, or perhaps the audience will see its destruction on an intimate, personal scale. In this sense, the director and designer assume the reigns of power usually reserved for emperors: “The landscape is there for us to play with,” Woodruff says. “It allows us the freedom to dictate what the ending will be.”

Miriam Weisfeld, a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. MXAT/Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, wrote this article during rehearsals for Britannicus.