Read Antony and Cleopatra Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra (27 page)
6. Guy Henry as a coolly calculating Octavius in the final scene, with Frances de la Tour as a Cleopatra stripped of her adornment: Steven Pimlott’s 1999 production.
Scholar and reviewer Katherine Duncan-Jones was distinctly unimpressed by the pairing of lovers: “Frances de la Tour’s Cleopatra is always energetic, yet never in the least enchanting or mysterious” and “one can’t help feeling sorry for the woefully miscast Alan Bates.”
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It was left to the
Glasgow Herald
’s Carole Woddis to put a more positive spin on the pair of lovers:
But how Steven Pimlott’s production capitalises on their assets. Like some ageing, floundering Beatrice and Benedick, this Antony and Cleopatra, fully fledged ironists, cling to each other for survival. Bates marvellously conveys the sensualist gone to pot, raddled decline showing in bitter laughter as de la Tour’s sardonic, capricious Cleopatra runs him another merry dance and he slips a rung lower.
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Michael Billington divided his praise between Malcolm Storry’s “amazing Enobarbus” and Guy Henry’s “equally remarkable” Octavius Caesar: “Slightly deaf in one ear, like great-uncle Julius, he is a consummate mix of vanity, hypocrisy and cool calculation.”
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Sinead Cusack, directed by Michael Attenborough (2002)
Reviews of Sinead Cusack’s Cleopatra, directed by Michael Attenborough in 2002, reveal much about perceptions of the role, and recall Tynan’s remarks about Peggy Ashcroft’s inability to play a “slut.” Where is the balance between being too dignified to be sexy and too sophisticated to warrant the label of “slut”? Reviewer and scholar Michael Dobson had no qualms about his right to censure:
Sinead Cusack was simply miscast as Cleopatra: lithe as she proved to be, her style of beauty is still that of an ingenue, and
in her transparent Egyptian robes she seemed less like a femme fatale than like an anxious Sunday school teacher who had forced herself to dress like a tart.
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Paul Taylor of the
Independent
put it another way: “Ms Cusack is a magnificent actress, but the role of Cleopatra does not play to her strengths. Her forte is for radiating passionate, witty intellect. This heroine, while canny and cunning, is more like a creature of instinct.”
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By contrast, Charles Spencer in the
Daily Telegraph
placed blame for the production’s “failings” on Stuart Wilson’s Antony:
It certainly doesn’t help that Antony, first discovered inhaling deeply on a hookah, seems to have spent far too much time on the wacky baccy to have much energy left for sex. With his grey braided hair, turquoise necklace, deeply lined face and arthritic gait, this Antony seems defeated before he’s even started, a clapped-out old hippy whose greatest gigs are long since behind him.
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A number of reviews suggested that Wilson’s voice was “under pressure”
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and inclined to be “reedy,”
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a problem associated with his background in film work and supposed inability to adapt to the different demands of the stage.
For Benedict Nightingale in the London
Times
, the set and costumes were not a total success:
Es Devlin’s set is a great silver arc above which is a map of Europe that frighteningly explodes and fragments during battles. That’s fine, but I wasn’t so happy with the futuristic grey cloaks and protruding trousers that make the Romans look like sci-fi Druids. The Egyptian court with its cushions and hookahs and air of sexual languor and ambivalence, is more what it should be.
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Michael Billington regretted the cutting of Pompey, losing “the cynical display of power relations aboard Pompey’s galley,” but he was enthusiastic about Cusack’s performance:
No qualms, however, about Cusack’s Cleopatra, which combines wit, glamour, emotional volatility and queenly dignity. You see this quality most clearly in the long adagio of Cleopatra’s end, where Cusack embraces death with a kind of exultation, crying, “He brings me liberty,” as the asp-bearer approaches. This is an excellent Cleopatra.
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Spencer cast a vote for Enobarbus, “Clive Wood is the best Enobarbus I have ever seen,”
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and Taylor was impressed by Stephen Campbell-Moore’s “priggish, boy-like Caesar.”
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Harriet Walter, directed by Gregory Doran (2006)
Reviewers agreed on the successful pairing of Harriet Walter with Patrick Stewart in Gregory Doran’s Complete Works Festival production. Susannah Clapp enthused in the
Observer
: “Harriet Walter is Stewart’s wonderful match. She’s not heavily voluptuous, but she’s physically and emotionally agile. And she uses the closeness of the Swan stage to miniaturize the play’s emotions without diminishing them.’”
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The two-page detailed map of the Mediterranean in the theater program became “an abstract, map-like backcloth” on the stage,
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signaling the reduction of politics and the foregrounding of the lovers. Veteran reviewer Sheridan Morley took the view that “Doran has realized that this is a play about passion rather than politics.”
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As if to emphasize this, the performance began with a sustained pause while Demetrius and Philo were forced to wait for their general to give them his attention: he was too besotted with Cleopatra. Benedict Nightingale described the impact of the lovers as “they bounded and squealed across the bare stage: she tying him to her with a napkin, he seizing and kissing her and then, to the boot-faced dismay of the assembled soldiers, hurling a Roman emissary to the ground.”
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Nicholas de Jongh in the
Evening Standard
remarked that “Gregory Doran’s new production of
Antony and Cleopatra
makes you see the drama of its dangerously smitten lovers in a fresh and fascinating light.”
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But de Jongh had his reputation to maintain as the RSC’s harshest critic. He demurred from the consensus over Walter’s ability to convey sexuality:
Harriet Walter’s skittish Cleopatra, attired in virginal white and a wig that harks back to Biba in 1968, speaking in that throaty, throttled voice of hers, has more than a trace of a haughty, temperamental captain of a girls’ public school about her. She remains insecure about the chances of holding on to her older man. This may sound disparaging. It is not intended to be. The attractive Walter, in common with many leading English actresses, is ill-suited to roles that call for blatant voluptuousness and sexual provocation. Her dryly comic, ironic Cleopatra may stint on passion but captures the queen’s blazing theatricality, vulnerability and joie de vivre.
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The vulnerability of these lovers especially impressed a number of critics. Charles Spencer commented on an “extraordinary moment” when Cleopatra removed her wig (the traditional Cleopatra bob) “to reveal the cropped hair beneath”: “you suddenly glimpse the emotional vulnerability and the fear of age that haunts her.”
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Georgina Brown, a female critic in what was still a predominantly male world of newspaper theater reviewing, wrote of Patrick Stewart:
Stewart’s superb Antony is wholly believable, both as the blokeish soldier getting smashed on Pompey’s barge, and as a lover in thrall to a wildly exciting woman. His attempt to mask his shame with affected cheeriness when he bids farewell to his servants is desperately moving.
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Brown added praise for Peter de Jersey’s “striking” Pompey, Julian Bleach’s Clown, and John Hopkins’s “impressive Caesar,” who combined “political nous with passion.”
Adrian Noble
, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His
Henry V
on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare
Theatre in Stratford sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were
Hamlet
, again with Branagh in the title role,
The Plantagenets
, based on the
Henry VI/Richard III
tetralogy, and the two parts of
Henry IV
, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in Noble’s second production of the tragedy for the company. Noble’s 1994
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas and balloons), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1982 production of
Antony and Cleopatra
in the intimate “black-box” Other Place at Stratford, which transferred the following year to the Gulbenkian Studio in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and The Pit at London’s Barbican Theatre. Michael Gambon was Antony and Helen Mirren was Cleopatra.
Braham Murray
is a founding artistic director of the Royal Exchange Theatre Company in Manchester. The Exchange is an in-the-round auditorium that is the leading producing house for classic theater in the north of England. He has directed numerous classic plays, both tragic and comic, as well as musicals, modern works, and new writing, in London, New York, and Toronto as well as Manchester. He gives an account of his theatrical career in an autobiography,
The Worst It Can Be Is a Disaster
(2007). Here he talks about his 2005 production of
Antony and Cleopatra
, with Josette Bushell-Mingo as Cleopatra and Tom Mannion as Antony.
Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner, Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His acclaimed
Antony and Cleopatra
in the small-scale neo-Elizabethan Swan Theatre, with
Patrick Stewart as Antony and Harriet Walter as Cleopatra, was part of the RSC’s 2006–07 Complete Works Festival.
The play takes in most of the Mediterranean world, and has more scene changes than any other (although not always broken down in the Folio). How did your staging confront these issues? In design terms, it must have been crucial to create contrasting worlds for Rome and Egypt
?
Noble:
It was a rather unusual design process. Originally I was going to design it myself. I had a set in my head that was very clearly worked out. Then I decided that wasn’t wise, so the night before the first day of rehearsal I brought in Nadine Baylis to design it for me.
If you look at the text there are many different locations. It bats about all over that cradle of civilization between Sicily and the Holy Land. To say we were going to create a scenic location for each spot seemed to me, from a practical point of view, to be a nonstarter. It struck me that when you are in Rome you spend your entire time thinking about Alexandria, and when you are in Alexandria you spend your entire time thinking about Rome! They talk about the other place all the time. I thought it was very important that each scene was produced from the point of view of the characters inside that scene, and that I shouldn’t overlay it with a heavy editorial hand and try to create an austere, rather fascistic sort of Rome and a rather lush, liquidy kind of Egypt. It struck me that the text should do that. My idea was that there would be a rather soft space, like a huge judo mat, that went right up to the sky, that the actors could actually climb up and hang off, but we didn’t do that in the end. It ended up as a rather old-fashioned design, with an upper level and a lower level. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. But the design didn’t editorialize at all; it didn’t impose a particular vision, because I thought that the play needed to talk directly to the audience. I wanted the set to be like a rolling camera that would take you with the protagonists wherever they went. Many people see it as quite a filmic script; the average length of scenes is quite short at many points of the play and Shakespeare edits it like what we would now understand film editing to be. In other words, when you want to
increase the excitement and the tension and the pace you have a series of short scenes. It’s the equivalent of how, just before the climax of a film, the length of a cut in the editing room gets shorter and shorter and shorter. I guess the impression for the audience is that it speeds up, and the heart rate goes up. We would now regard that as a filmic technique.