In PRESTIGE PREHISTORY, Pop Heist critic Sean T. Collins takes a look at classic TV shows that paved the way for the New Golden Age of Television — challenging, self-contained series from writers and filmmakers determined to push the medium forward by telling stories their own way.
I, Claudius Episode 3
"Waiting in the Wings"
Original Airdate: Sep. 27, 1976
Writer: Jack Pulman (based on the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves)
Director: Herbert Wise
Cast: Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Frances White, Margaret Tyzack, Simon MacCorkindale, Darien Angadi, Ashley Knight, Michael Clements, Alister Kerr, Kevin Stoney
Julia Caesaris, the only child of Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, is not an innately tragic figure. Despite losing two husbands (Marcellus and Marcus Agrippa) and a son (Gaius) to the machinations of her murderous stepmother Livia, she leads a carefree life.
Actually, carefree is understating the case considerably, except insofar as it emphasizes how little she ultimately seems to care about these seemingly lifechanging losses. Her life is sybaritic, hedonistic. As long as she can eat delicious foods and bed delicious men — a task made much easier thanks to her dad, Augustus Caesar, banishing her husband Tiberius for abusing her — she's perhaps the happiest character on this show.
Then this happens.
"Father! Father! Please! Please let me in! Let me talk to you! Let me explain! Father? Father! Please, please don't send me away! Please, please, please don't send me away! I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear it! Not alone. Please! Pleeeeease! Please! Please, Father! Please let me talk to you! Father, please! Please. Give me another chance. Please. Please."
While this formerly vivacious, fun-loving, vigorously horny woman is reduced to begging for anything but a life of solitary confinement, Augustus — who is both her father and now her jailor — barricades his doors and hides his ears. He can't bear to hear that she can't bear what he's doing to her. But that doesn't stop him from doing it.
Speaking personally, I find this scene absolutely pulverizing.
Actor Frances White throws herself into Julia's desperate struggle for her father's mercy the way Sheryl Lee would in Twin Peaks a decade and a half later. (Amazing that as little time separates I, Claudius from Twin Peaks as separates us right now from the premiere of Game of Thrones.) And Brian Blessed, whose robust Augustus is at last beginning to show the signs of emotionally and neurologically fallible old age, is painful to watch as he hides himself not just from his daughter's screams, but from his own guilt, perhaps even from his own gods.
But the context of this gut-wrenching scene of parental abandonment makes it all the more shocking. Up until this point, this has been the sleaziest, sexiest, most scandalous episode of I, Claudius yet. It's centered on the many adulteries Julia commits while her erstwhile husband, the dyspeptic and visibly aging Tiberius, is off in exile in Rhodes with his Greek astrologer cum whipping boy, Thrasyllus (Kevin Stoney).
Chief among these illicit affairs is her relationship with Plautius (Darien Angadi), a bronze-skinned himbo who's friends with her comparatively upright and illustrious son, Lucius (Simon MacCorkindale). Lucius is set to command the Roman forces in Spain, and as Julia's oldest surviving son by her late husband Marcus Agrippa — Livia already offed his older brother Gaius, then had the body burned before an autopsy could be performed — he's the heir to the Empire. As such, he's an obstacle for Livia's own son, Tiberius, though his banishment would eliminate him from the line of succession no matter what.
Julia's philandering presents Livia with an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, or so she thinks. She confronts Plautius with her knowledge of his affair with Julia. When he protests that he could do nothing to resist a daughter of Caesar, Livia wonders if the same applies to Caesar's wife. What happens next — the ambitious Plautius works up a hard-on for Livia, which she can feel through their respective robes, despite the fact that he finds her old and repellent — is so thinly veiled it may as well have been filmed in pornographic detail.
Plautius's boner steers the fate of the Empire. Livia, who doesn't even bother to feel flattered, takes it as a sign that the young man is willing to do anything to advance his career. First, she uses him to encourage Julia's debauchery, setting up full-scale orgies for her in which she enjoys the attentions of both senators and slaves. But even irrefutable proof would seem suspect to Augustus if it came from Livia, whose desire to prove Julia was at fault for the incident with Tiberius is well known to him.
So she manipulates Julia's own son Lucius into presenting Augustus with Julia's body count, making the young man believe it was his own idea. A furious Augustus banishes Julia to a lifetime of solitary confinement, knowing that the pleasures of human company, carnal and otherwise, are what make her life worth living. It's an exceptionally cruel punishment, from a man so unused to being defied that he reacts like a capricious madman when the moment comes.
But this does not mean Tiberius is off the hook. On the contrary, Augustus is angrier than ever with his stepson, whom he now blames for driving Julia into a life of sin. His vow that Tiberius will never return to Rome is nearly as ferocious in its fury as Julia's begging was in its grief — but of course the fury itself is just grief transformed into an emotion with which Augustus is more comfortable.
The situation as it stands is precarious for many people. Tiberius remains in exile, and as long as that's true, his poor fortune-teller Thrasyllus remains in danger of getting tossed off a cliff for failing to predict glad tidings. Julia is in exile and torment, but two of her three sons by Agrippa, upright Lucius and young Postumus (Alister Kerr), are alive and well and ahead of Tiberius in the line of succession. When Augustus dies, and Julia's sons come into their own? "Take my advice," Julia spits at Livia before they take her away, "and climb on the funeral pyre with him!"
But as usual, Livia comes out ahead. In a black-comedy scene straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Tiberius and Thrasyllus receive the news that Lucius has died in a freak boating accident — wouldn't you know it, Plautius somehow survived the wreck! — by having a two-minute laugh attack. Now Tiberius' exile is ended, he's called back to Rome, he more or less patches things up with Augustus … and only poor, terrified young Postumus stands between Livia, Tiberius, and the throne.
Observing all this from the margins is none other that the show's eponymous character. Depicted as a little boy by Ashley Knight, Claudius has a twitch, a limp, a bad foot, and a stammer. Many members of the royal family — particularly the women, it seems, from his mother Antonia to his grandmother Livia to his sister Livilla (Katharine Levy) — dismiss him as mentally incompetent. Augustus' own attempt to hold the boy up as an example of fine young Roman stock to a group of avowed bachelors he's forcing to get married and start families shows that the kid's a laughing stock. As usual, Augustus doesn't see what he chooses not to.
But Augustus is closer to the right of it than Livia is, that's the funny thing. Much as the Emperor is blind to his wife's evil, Livia is blind to Claudius's cleverness. It's he who gains valuable lessons in how the empire is really being run simply by lurking in the background and letting people dismiss and ignore him as a halfwit. And it's he who the gods themselves seem to deem the future savior of a battered, wretched Rome, when an eagle drops a wounded wolf cub directly into the boy's arms. Even Antonia defends the boy after that portentous moment, if only briefly.
And Claudius is respected by at least some of his peers. He's close with Herod (Michael Clements), nephew of the villainous New Testament King of the Jews and an unfailingly polite and erudite guest of the court from the far provinces. Poor Postumus seems close with both boys as well, but none of the kids of their generation could possibly protect him if Tiberius or Livia decided to clear the decks, and they all know it. The episode ends with the aged Claudius sitting in the exact courtyard where Postumus voiced his fears, as if the moment had only happened seconds before.
It's an appropriate note for the episode to end on, because so much of I, Claudius's success stems from its ability to make the past feel present, to make the distant feel immediate. It's not so hard to believe that Claudius remembers his childhood friend's terror like it was yesterday when the very same show has made you cry actual tears for the plight of a woman who died millennia ago, a woman you've never known beyond the pages of a book or the pixels of a screen.
But again, this same woman was making raunchy jokes about how her relationship with Tiberius wasn't "fulfilling" because she was "rarely filled and never full," just a few minutes prior to her defenestration from society. Meanwhile, Livia, the woman orchestrating murder after murder right under the nose of the family's all-powerful patriarch, tests the mettle of her latest catspaw by daring him to get it up for her, all but purring with pleasure and approval when he does. There's a full-on orgy, women have their titties out, Augustus interrogates people as to the number of times they fucked his daughter, the whole nine. This show is horny as hell!
I think there's a reason for that. Clive Barker, the horror auteur behind Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Candyman, once told me that his stories so heavily involved sex because it was a convenient and convincing reason for people to be stupid enough to open doors that would have people in movie theaters screaming "No, dumbass, don't open that door!" The overpowering desire for sex is a taste of the irrational all of us experience, and most of us can still safely incorporate into our lives without losing control.
Power is a similar intoxicant — the ultimate aphrodisiac, according to war criminal and court vizier Henry Kissinger. No wonder everyone's acting crazy! The existence of an Emperor is to political power what broadcasting hardcore pornography on every big screen in Times Square would be to overt sexuality. It makes everyone within its radius lust for power themselves. Do we all go a little mad sometimes, as the fella says? Yes. We just generally don't have absolute authority over life and death when we do. Woe betide the world when that power is put into play.
One final note: Since the sets and set-ups are so limited on this show, it falls to blocking and camera placement and movement to create a sense of space, pacing, and momentum. Good Lord, does it ever do so in this episode. From the long take that sees Augustus stalk up and down a line of Julia's accused lovers like a wolf selecting his prey, to the way the camera wheels around from a triumphant Livia to an enraged Augustus when the power shifts between them following Julia's exile, these shots and staging decisions use physical space to convey the political and psychological hierarchy of the royal family — who's on top and who's beneath them, who's the public face and who's the force in the background. As a visual text, I, Claudius one of the most watchable shows I've ever seen, no frills required.
