Antony and Cleopatra (25 page)

The Cambridge scholar and director George “Dadie” Rylands thought that “Laurence Olivier sacrificed Antony to Cleopatra and ‘for his ordinary paid his heart.’”
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Harry Andrews’ Enobarbus and Robert Helpmann’s Octavius Caesar were both praised, as was Michael Benthall’s skillful textual pruning designed to romanticize the lovers—he cut the Seleucus episode and Ventidius’ triumph at Misenum. Benthall
used a revolving stage to facilitate scene changes and lighting to reinforce the distinction between a warm scarlet Egypt and cobalt-blue Rome. Rylands recalled the final tableau that the audience carried away from the St James’s Theatre: “Who will forget Vivien Leigh, robed and crowned in the habiliments of an Egyptian goddess, beauty on a monument smiling extremity out of act? The gipsy, the ribaudred nag, the boggler, the triple-turned whore, the fragment of Gneius Pompey’s trencher, were all forgotten.”
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Glen Byam Shaw’s second production at Stratford (1953) was praised for the “cinematic celerity”
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of scenes which “shuttle in
unbroken succession, the luxurious glow of the East giving instant place to the cold white of Rome, and it is only a second and closer look that assures one each is a pure illusion created by light alone in the cyclorama.”
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The performances of Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft as the lovers were “still being used as a touchstone forty years later,”
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despite concern that Ashcroft was miscast as Cleopatra: “She is neither physically large enough nor temperamentally earthy enough.”
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Always uneasy with the role of Cleopatra, critical desire for a realist fusion of actor and role is apparent in Kenneth Tynan’s comment that the part which “English actresses are naturally equipped to play is Octavia…an English Cleopatra is a contradiction in terms.”
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Despite this, critics admired her performance: “Miss Ashcroft presents the sensual, termagant queen with wonderful power and skill; but we miss the sluttish and unpredictable gipsy. It is nevertheless a triumphant piece of acting, most moving in its climax in the last act.”
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2. Michael Redgrave as Antony and Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra in Glen Byam Shaw’s 1953 Stratford production: critics wondered whether Ashcroft had the right kind of sex appeal.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 brought Egypt to national consciousness once more. Robert Helpmann’s production at the Old Vic the following year was frequently described as “cinematic” in scope and technique. The single set was “dominated by obelisks (‘Cleopatra’s Needles’) that clever lighting turned into Roman pillars,” which “not only accommodated the play’s restlessness, but assisted ‘cinematic’ juxtaposition”
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and allowed Helpmann “to bring the Cleopatra who is present to Antony’s mind’s eye in Rome advancing from the other side of the stage to begin her scene in Alexandria.”
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Keith Michell’s Antony was “not so colossal a wreck as Redgrave’s, nor as commanding as Olivier’s,”
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but nevertheless bestrid the stage; but Margaret Whiting, despite her raven hair and “shapeliness,” failed to “balance majesty with sensuality.”
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The box office success of the 1960 American Shakespeare Festival was Jack Landau’s production in which Katharine Hepburn’s Cleopatra was praised for “her passion, both the sensuous and hot-tempered varieties,” although Robert Ryan’s Antony disappointed.
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The set and lighting for Michael Langham’s production for the 1967 Stratford Festival in Ontario allowed the play “to move as fluently as a movie, with sharp cuts or slow dissolves as the pace requires. Miss [Tanya] Moisewitch’s costumes—gun-metal blues for the Romans,
sandy browns for the Egyptians—have the heft and good taste that mark the entire production.”
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Christopher Plummer’s Antony was seen as the “focus of sympathy,” while Zoe Caldwell played Cleopatra “more for our understanding than for our sympathy.”
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There is evidence in these productions of an increasing awareness of the play’s politics, an element stressed in Evgenii Simonov’s 1971 production at the Vaktangov Theatre in Moscow, which used a translation by Boris Pasternak and starred Mikhail Ul’ianov and Iuliana Borisova. Geopolitical games were emphasized at the Bankside Globe in 1973. Tony Richardson’s first modern-dress production set in the 1920s, with Vanessa Redgrave in a red wig, white trouser suit, and sunglasses and Julian Glover’s Antony in military khaki, was intended as “a comment on power politics today.”
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Critics on the whole were unimpressed and felt that the modern dress largely eliminated the distinction between Rome and Egypt. Notable overseas productions included Alf Sjöberg’s 1975 production in Stockholm and Robin Phillips’ the following year at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in which Keith Baxter and Maggie Smith played the leads on “an almost bare stage with a canopied set.” Baxter’s Antony was of “mythic stature” and Smith was “an inspiring Cleopatra of the seventies: one who was an actor of infinite variety and assured domination, yet vulnerable.”
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Apart from the RSC productions discussed below, Peter Hall’s National Theatre production in 1987 with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins as a relatively mature pair of lovers was widely acclaimed:

Alison Chitty’s designs were inspired by the paintings of Veronese, especially
Mars and Venus Bound by Cupid
: “This provided an apt visual equivalent to the play, both in its style and in its subject matter: a Renaissance view of a classical love affair. It created an ideal context for Peter Hall’s confidently paced, unostentatious reading of
the play and for Judi Dench’s superb Cleopatra.”
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The pictorial style of the Italian Renaissance also avoided “the now embarrassing theatricality of blacking up…and, more pertinently in 1987, the decision as to whether to employ actors of colour.”
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The casting of Cleopatra has, ironically, proved problematic ever since women took over the part from boys. Race has now become an additional issue. Barry Rutter’s 1995 production for Northern Broadsides at the Viaduct in Halifax and Michael Bogdanov’s 1998 English Shakespeare Company production at the Hackney Empire both updated the play and cast black or mixed race actors as Cleopatra, Ishia Bennison and Cathy Tyson respectively. Rutter’s production was set in the north of England and simply staged—Pompey’s galley became a pub. For
Guardian
critic Michael Billington, “The great merit of Bogdanov’s updated production—with clocks on the sleekly sliding walls of Yannis Thavoris’s set depicting various time zones—is that it makes a complex play extremely clear.”
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In 1999 Mark Rylance played Cleopatra in an all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Giles Block. Reviews tended to focus on Rylance’s performance, which at least one critic thought offered “a genuine revelation of the play and the role that I have never seen exploited before.”
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Another thought it “a captivating performance. Rylance’s Cleopatra was a skipping coquette who roved across her stage, tossing her head of black curls and jangling her gold bracelets.”
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Rylance and the production overcame elements of “campiness” in the final act:

The play continues to challenge actors, directors, and audiences with radical and experimental productions which explore the play’s
complex mixture of politics, passion, and play-acting. Cinema would seem the perfect solution to many of the play’s staging problems, but the only cinema film of Shakespeare’s play is an idiosyncratic 1972 version directed by Charlton Heston in which he plays Antony himself, with a miscast Hildegarde Neil as Cleopatra. There is a lot of water in it, including a full-scale Battle of Actium. Jonathan Miller’s 1981 production for the BBC television Shakespeare, with Jane Lapotaire and Colin Blakely, was again inspired by pictorial images from the Renaissance. The most successful filmed version is Jon Scoffield’s adaptation of Trevor Nunn’s 1972 RSC production with Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson:

Almost without exception, the starting point for a director of
Antony and Cleopatra
is the casting of the female lead. The following account of seven RSC productions accordingly begins from their Cleopatras.

Janet Suzman, directed by Trevor Nunn (1972)

Janet Suzman is widely regarded as one of the greatest Cleopatras of modern times. Her triumph in Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production was in part due to her success in separating the monarch from the myth, the Shakespearean text from the clichéd image. Suzman’s Cleopatra was “only incidentally a voluptuary.” Her most powerful weapon was her language, which ran the gamut from lyricism to capriciousness. The reviewer for the London
Times
could hardly contain himself: “she presents Cleopatra’s caprice with immense relish and wit: and last night, as her eyes glazed in a moment that communicated the sudden stopping of her pulse, I was held in something like awe.”
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3. Janet Suzman as Cleopatra attended by her women and eunuchs in Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production.

Antony and Cleopatra
was the third play to appear in the 1972 season’s cycle of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, exploring the politics of Rome, “the birth, achievement and collapse of a civilisation.”
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The critic Peter Thomson suggested that the plays presented “four different historical crises,” with Rome growing from “small tribe to City-state (
Coriolanus
), to Republic (
Julius Caesar
), to Empire (
Antony and Cleopatra
), and to a decadence that is the prelude to Gothic conquest (
Titus Andronicus
).”
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The King Tutankhamen exhibition, which opened in March 1972, stimulated interest in Ancient Egypt, as mile-long queues snaked around the British Museum. The text accompanying artwork in the theater program referred to “Cleopatra wearing the sun-disk and horns of Hathor, Egyptian goddess of love. From a bas-relief carved at the time of Cleopatra in the temple at Deir el Bahri Egypt.” The production’s costumes and design, by Christopher Morley, tapped into this interest. Critic Kenneth Hurren noted that “the way in which Cleopatra’s court is kitted out might well have excited the envy of the late Tutankhamen (even the platoon of flabby, shaven-headed eunuchs appear to have small fortunes in gold and lapis lazuli hung about their necks).”
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