Read Antony and Cleopatra Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra (26 page)
The design highlighted the contrast between the play’s two worlds:
While a clear sky gleamed over Rome, a mottled heaven looked down upon the changeable world of Cleopatra, whose every mood was framed with a different environment. Beneath canopies of midnight blue or orange, the Queen lay on divans or cushions; or dreaming of angling for Antony in the river, on a great keyhole-shaped bed. While the stark black and white of the Romans’ clothes was modified only by a formal purple, Cleopatra’s court disported themselves in pinks, mauves and oranges.
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Michael Billington of the
Guardian
commented that Richard Johnson’s Antony suggested his “Herculean past, his weak presence and his hope of redemption through love: the grace-notes may be missing but it’s a performance that suggests the lines have passed through the actor’s imagination.”
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Reviewers concurred in also singling
out particular praise for Patrick Stewart in the role of Enobarbus: over thirty years later, he would return to the play as Antony.
Glenda Jackson, directed by Peter Brook (1978)
While Trevor Nunn’s memorable production presented a historical sense of Egypt to capture the imagination, Peter Brook’s austere interpretation gave a different emphasis. He took a purposefully unromantic approach, reading the lovers (Glenda Jackson and Alan Howard) as self-indulgent figures who were at the same time forever embroiled in political intrigue. The veteran reviewer J. C. Trewin was impressed:
This, the most important production of the year, is a grandly expository
Antony and Cleopatra
not (as the play used to be) an indulgent romantic orgy…Philo’s opening fanfare is uttered directly to the house (as much else is, including a great deal of the Barge speech) and the entrance of Antony (Alan Howard) and Cleopatra (Glenda Jackson) is almost inconspicuous in the middle of an austere set, like a vacant conservatory opaquely glazed. Scene hurtles upon scene with hardly a second’s pause. The tragedy of this illusion sweeps across the stage uncut… These are lovers for the high-event; they are never conventionally aloof from each other…believe me, Brook, Jackson and Howard are a triumvirate to remember.
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Not all reviewers were so enthusiastic. One sneered that “Miss Jackson does not register on an emotional level,”
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while another—clearly longing for something more in the mold of Elizabeth Taylor—was put off by her “Eton crop”: “I couldn’t persuade myself that Miss Jackson’s mannish lady was a Cleopatra capable of the sexual and social excesses we have described to us.”
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Don Chapman of the
Oxford Mail
remarked: “It is left to Alan Howard as Mark Antony to suggest the epic nature of their love in a performance of remarkable emotional and vocal power.”
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Michael Billington, by contrast, found much to admire in Jackson’s performance:
Glenda Jackson’s Cleopatra is certainly the most ferocious I have ever seen: no messenger is safe from a hair pulling. She
kicks her treasurer right around the stage and even Antony is often pummeled by her far from tiny fist…Miss Jackson also suggests the wit, the volatility and the genuine passion (witness the shriek of pain when she thinks Antony is dead).
Billington also described how Brook’s consciously unostentatious production found a simple solution to the problem of hauling a dying Antony up into the monument:
This simplicity is clean counter to tradition. In the Redgrave-Ashcroft version at Stratford years ago, I remember a huge monument arising out of the ground like a mightily Miltonic exhalation: here a dark red cloth symbolises the monument and when Antony has to be hauled onto it Cleopatra and her attendants simply drag him across the floor with the aid of their belts.
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4. Antony is dragged across the floor, instead of heaved up to the monument: Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra and Alan Howard as Antony in Peter Brook’s 1978 stripped-down production.
Patrick Stewart again played Enobarbus. This time he was “a man as besotted on Cleopatra as his master and one who enters into Egyptian hedonism with sheer sensual enjoyment.”
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Helen Mirren, directed by Adrian Noble (1982)
Adrian Noble’s production boldly took a play associated with large-scale spectacle and rendered it on the bare floor of the minimalist studio theater, The Other Place. The stripped-down setting threw emphasis onto the skills of the actors, and Helen Mirren did not disappoint in the role of Cleopatra.
Rather than relying on dripping jewelry, bobbed hair, and the other clichés of Oriental exoticism, Mirren rapidly established her complete authority by means of “lightning emotional reversals.” Her Cleopatra and Michael Gambon’s Antony pushed “the temperamental polarities” of the roles well beyond the usual limits, according to Irving Wardle in the London
Times
. He added, “In Gambon’s case this means a contrast between the public behaviour of a demi-god and a private life in which he regresses to the total sensuous dependence of infancy.”
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Nicholas Shrimpton, writing in the academic journal
Shakespeare Survey
, was puzzled by Bob Peck’s portrayal of Enobarbus: he “spoke ‘The barge she sat in’ in the outraged tones of a plain man who deeply disapproved of luxury.” Elsewhere, however, Shrimpton found “the fresh ideas were profoundly effective”: “Romans (and in particular Jonathan Hyde’s Octavius Caesar) were presented not as chilly technocrats but as emotional
mafiosi
, swarthy, violent, and sudden.” Shrimpton argued that the intimate space of The Other Place contributed to Mirren’s performance: “Only inches from her audience, in a crowded studio theater, she conducted a complex and tumultuous inner life with complete assurance.” He described the “remarkable depths” she gave to the final acts:
In mourning for Antony she contrived an extraordinary ruin of her beauty—squatting on a grubby blanket, dressed in black with her hair scraped back and ash and dirt on her face. More astonishing even than this, however, was the subsequent transition to her suicide. As Caesar left, she suddenly passed
(on “He words me, girls”) from an extremity of violent grief to a serene perception of her fate.
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Sorcha Cusack’s Charmian and Josette Simon’s Iras provided powerful support: the audience’s focus at the end was above all on a community of women, who were like sisters.
Clare Higgins, directed by John Caird (1992)
John Caird’s production was the first at Stratford for ten years and the first on the main stage for fifteen years. Richard Johnson recreated the role he had played with Janet Suzman twenty years before. He offered a world-weary Antony to Clare Higgins’s sensual Cleopatra. Reviewer Peter Holland found Johnson “quite simply too old and wearied,” adding:
While a production might reasonably have wanted to explore an age-gap between the lovers, it cannot dispense with a sexual charisma around Antony. If Antony is not attractive, even in an elderly grizzled way, the production’s argument will tilt unbalanced and Johnson could do nothing to project a reason
for Cleopatra’s fascination with him to match his obvious obsession with her.
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5. A disparity of ages: Richard Johnson returns to Antony twenty years on, this time with Clare Higgins, in John Caird’s 1992 production.
A program note on acting versions during the Restoration referred to Dryden’s
All for Love
(1678), which reduced the play to “a debate on love and honour.” Critic Malcolm Rutherford was of the view that some kind of “reduction” had also taken place here: “This is not the
Antony and Cleopatra
that we know and love…There is no sense of the Roman machine, toy battles predominate and Rome seems as drunk as Egypt.”
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The same critic dismissed Johnson’s Antony as “an ageing, lecherous slob,” while accusing Clare Higgins of making Cleopatra “a slut” (that term of Tynan’s again). Other reviewers felt that the love affair dominated Caird’s production with some degree of felicity and that the tragic pair grew in stature toward the end of the play. Benedict Nightingale in the London
Times
gave a sense of Higgins’s range:
Higgins is an intelligent Cleopatra—note her deliberately inscrutable handling of Caesar’s smug envoy—but it is intensity and volatility of feeling that mainly mark her. How well she does the scene in which she sulks at Antony for still being married to Fulvia, then learns of his wife’s death, then attacks him for mourning her. One moment she is shrieking and striking out, the next mocking and sneering, the next tenderly comforting him, the next getting the giggles. No wonder Antony is in her power. Everywhere their rapport is unmissable.
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Charles Spencer in the
Daily Telegraph
focused more on the set:
Sue Blane’s design consists of great walls and pillars of ancient stone and brick—in Egypt they are bathed in golden light and placed on the side of the stage to allow a panorama of the cerulean sky beyond. But in Rome they close claustrophobically round the characters, blotting out the sun and suggesting the harsh world of duty and discipline that Antony has abandoned for sensual delight.
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Michael Billington in the
Guardian
recalled the effect of a particularly spectacular moment: “Much of the evening’s pleasure lies in the voluptuous staging: as Octavius (admirably played by John Nettles not as the usual cold fish but as a man hungry for triumph) describes how the lovers publicly display themselves, we see them enthroned in gold surrounded by their bastard children.”
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Frances de la Tour, directed by Steven Pimlott (1999)
Steven Pimlott’s production, in which Frances de la Tour played Cleopatra to Alan Bates’s Antony, was less concerned with providing a classical Egyptian world for the lovers and more interested in exploring the play’s ambiguities. The approach was perhaps reflected in the design of Yolanda Sonnabend’s set and the costumes:
Costumes hinted at several periods: there was armour for Antony, but his soldiers looked more likely to fight a twentieth-century war; Cleopatra’s court, with cocktails and cigarettes, had a look (and sound) of the 1920s, whereas the Romans, in their austerely-cut, dark grey coats, seemed vaguely eighteenth-century; and Cleopatra’s remarkable array of often very revealing gowns defied dating. The set presented a selection of oddly contrasted objects—a suspended sail, a broken classical pillar, various geometric shapes, military kit of several periods—but was dominated by three huge screens, sometimes transparent, sometimes reflective from their different angles.
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Critic Alastair Macaulay responded to the philosophical nuances made available by the use of the screens:
We are at first aware of several different layers of existence. The main action occurs in the central polygonal stage area, with three tall walls—half windows, half mirrors—showing us reflections but also the larger realms behind: a pyramid, with the wide circles of the world and the sunlit sky beyond. But then central and peripheral characters—Enobarbus,
Eros, Antony, Iras, Cleopatra, Charmian—begin to make choices between the light of this world and the dark of the next, and each one of them chooses darkness, death, suicide. Now we notice that all the scenery behind has vanished; that behind this hollow octagon there is nothing but the wall of the theatre.
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Nicholas de Jongh of the
Evening Standard
suggested another reason for the mirrors: “Pimlott’s idea is to show how often Antony and Cleopatra behave like narcissistic actors, who relish watching themselves perform as lovers and victims of desire and fate.”
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Certainly,
the opening scene, in which Antony’s head was discovered in Cleopatra’s lap, “the middle-aged lovebirds in a graphic, if rather dutiful looking, bout of cunnilingus,” was a self-indulgent display.
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Irving Wardle of the London
Times
suggested that the production “shows the psychological effects of continuous public exposure. Play-acting has become second nature to the mighty couple.”
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