ARTS David Mamet’s hit Broadway comedy November seems to capture the clash and clang of the current political moment better than Richard Nelson’s relatively quiet new drama, in which the statesmen of ancient Rome debate the downfall of the republic and the topicality is inferred.
And yet the Mamet, enjoyable though it may be, disappears from the mind as quickly as a late-night comic’s monologue, while the Nelson continues to reverberate for days. The epochal postscript to Tusculum – the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44BC – may be undramatised here, but the thinking that precedes it, which is Nelson’s subject, is riveting.
