about the play

When Gore Vidal adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “Romulus the Great” in

1962, he had his work cut out for him. American novelist and occasional

playwright, Vidal knew that adaptation went against everything we viewers

hold sacred in the art of theatre. Namely, an unshaking fidelity to the

writer’s own authentic experiences.

Romulus embodies Vidal’s obsession with classical culture, but that’s where

Vidal’s relatability to the Swiss playwright’s work seems to end. He once

commented that Roman life couldn’t be further away from the modern

American experience if it tried. If that is the case, what is he trying to pull

off by dropping our theatre-goers smack-dab in the middle of antiquity?

While the play’s ambiguities deliberately evade a direct response to

that question, the work’s key themes quickly, and brilliantly, unfold to

obvious effect. Respectfully eloquent, yet deliberately biting, Vidal’s play

encompasses what we anticipate most in a modern lyricist: the adoration

of morality contrasted with the gradations and subjectivity of our own

personal truths. He is able to make a far-off world relevant by infusing

it with lofty, objective truths and the uncertainties inherent in each and

everyone one of us.

But Vidal was able to succeed where even some of the most talented

playwrights struggled, not only because he harped on life’s most intangible

philosophical questions, but because he put the conversation precisely in a

tone we understand, which is to say, political.

Vidal takes Dürrenmatt’s backdrop of the fall of the Roman empire and

injects it with scathing irony, a task Vidal was readily equipped to handle.

Vidal’s Romulus little resembles the real Romulus Augustus, Rome’s last

Caesar who barely reached adolescence when he inadvertently presided over

the fall of the Roman emperor, much to everyone’s dismay. That’s about the

end of this play’s historical references. Our Romulus doesn’t just accept the

fall of civilization as he knows it, he quite condones it.

Prancing around the palace as Rome literally crumbs, Romulus has the

undesirable task of warding off political players he rejects and despises.

From the phony capitalistic pants manufacturer, whose business ventures

seem to garner him reluctant public support despite his cluelessness to the

bureaucrats who operate under meaningless terms and convoluted policy

plans to hide the fact that they are more cogs in the machine, we can’t help but

see the detriments of our own political landscape.

But when Romulus finally meets his antithesis, the ominous German invader

Ottaker, we are left with more than political commentary. The scene is not

marked by victorious battles of brute force. Instead, we find a showdown

between ideologies that is both provocative and amusing. Ottaker tugs and

pulls at Romulus’ logic until the great Caesar’s philosophical underpinnings,

which he’s spent a lifetime concocting, barely have a leg to stand on, making

Romulus’ neat bifurcations of the world – wrong vs right, past vs future,

truth vs falsehood – seem a little too naïve. But in the face of his own

internal inconsistencies, Romulus’ cunning wit finds some push back of his

own and he undercovers just as much fault in Ottaker’s new world order as

that of his old. Whether or not our heroes and antiheroes have triumphed

or been defeated, discerned the cold hard truth or equivocated yet again,

we’re forced to reckon with some inconvenient and subtle similarities

between their world and ours.

Who knows, there may just be a lesson here about the decay of the Roman

empire that can inform our contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism.

Or maybe it’s just a slight jab at the thought of making America great again.