In the Flesh: I, Claudius

I, Claudius, the BBC’s 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God, is an artifact of an entirely different television landscape. A horny, violent, and darkly funny historical epic which aired during primetime on a publicly funded network? Pretty much unthinkable by modern standards, though its aftershocks shaped the landscape of modern television from Twin Peaks to The Sopranos. Frank depictions of sexuality, an understanding of humor’s inextricability from human drama, and the pronounced influence of Shakespeare’s history plays with all their violence, profanity, and irreverence made the sometimes ramshackle BBC production into one of the century’s most important programs, a visual and thematic key for virtually everything that followed. The sexy backstabbing of Game of Thrones, the pitch-black slapstick of Breaking Bad, even the outsize drama of soaps like Dynasty and the more recent Empire owe a great deal to I, Claudius’s style of storytelling.

The series’ script, written start to finish by legendary page-to-screen adaptor Jack Pulman, is astonishingly confident, only minimally hampered by the work of introducing so many characters at such a rapid clip. There’s a fair amount of “why, my brother Germanicus has returned from Parthia” and then someone else goes “Germanicus Nero, grandson of Mark Antony?”, but there’s no other way to handle the sheer volume of the cast and the speed at which old faces die off and new ones rotate in. Pulman’s dialogue is dry, earthy, and cutting, and the series’ cast are more than up to the challenge of making it sing. From Derek Jacobi’s pained stammer and honest, wide-eyed naivete as Claudius to the late and deeply underappreciated George Baker’s scowling, joyless performance as Tiberius — whose death scene is perhaps the funniest in television history — there’s a sort of dramatic house style to the production, a campy quality of the stage you don’t see on television anymore. It makes the cheap sets and backgrounds, really just the same small handful of rooms redressed and shot from different angles, feel like the Senate, the Circus Maximus, the gardens of the Julio-Claudian imperial palace.

If there’s a sour note in the production, it’s the papering over of the many ways in which homosexuality and gender nonconformity were woven through Roman life. Considering the prominent position incest holds in the show’s plotting, it feels genuinely mean-spirited that its only instances of crossdressing and gay sex occur during one of Caligula’s (John Hurt) state-sponsored orgies. Still, even this ahistorical aversion to gay behavior can’t undo the jaw-dropping work of actress Siân Phillips as Livia, wife to Augustus and serial poisoner of her entire extended family. She’s a villain from and for the history books, her delivery of threats and innuendo so dry it practically chaps your lips just to hear it. The old age makeup — latex and greasepaint and wigs of various quality — is obvious, the sets are reused and often backed by painted canvas made up to resemble columns and other architectural features, the VHS filming is grainy and the battles and spectacles all conveniently off-camera, but all of this minimalism leaves the cast and script alone and lets them soar, touching wonder and terror with such genuine feeling that it calls into question modern film’s obsession with realism and seamless illusion. We know we’re watching a confabulation; why shouldn’t we just admit it and then act the hell out of it anyway?