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.61
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.”62 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.63
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.64
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.”65
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.66
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.67
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.”68 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.69 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.”70
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.”71 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.72
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.”73
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.74
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.”75 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.76
A number of reviews suggested that Wilson’s voice was “under pressure”77 and inclined to be “reedy,”78 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 t
hat 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.79
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.80
Spencer cast a vote for Enobarbus, “Clive Wood is the best Enobarbus I have ever seen,”81 and Taylor was impressed by Stephen Campbell-Moore’s “priggish, boy-like Caesar.”82
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.’”83
The two-page detailed map of the Mediterranean in the theater program became “an abstract, map-like backcloth” on the stage,84 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.”85 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.”86 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.”87 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.88
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.”89 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.90
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.”
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH ADRIAN NOBLE, BRAHAM MURRAY, AND GREGORY DORAN
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 a
s 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.
Murray: The great thing about the Royal Exchange being a theater in the round is that you can be very fluid, so you can give a kind of cinematic production. You can change scenes without doing very much at all—you can do it through light. Essentially, one side of the stage in the round was Rome and the other side was Egypt, and by changing the lighting, and of course the characters coming on and off, there was a fluidity which is much more difficult to attempt on the proscenium arch.
Doran: The one thing we were absolutely determined not to do was roll on the pyramids when it was Egypt and Trajan’s column or a great triumphal arch when it was Rome. You know when it’s Egypt because there is Cleopatra and her court, and you know it’s Rome when Octavius Caesar is on. I’m sure that the play would get terribly clogged down if you spent too much time separating them and adding to what is already quite a long play.
Antony and Cleopatra Page 18