Antony and Cleopatra (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) Read online

  Subsequent productions cut Shakespeare's text in the interest of decorum and reduced the number of scenes drastically. In productions such as Frederick Chatterton's in 1873 at Drury Lane, Lewis Wingfield's at the Princess's in 1890 with Lily Langtry as Cleopatra, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree's at His Majesty's Theatre in 1906, archaeological spectacle--elaborate scenic reconstruction of Egyptian antiquity--was the keynote and successfully upstaged individual performances. Chatterton reduced the text to twelve scenes and included Cleopatra's barge and her first meeting with Antony as well as an Egyptian ballet, thirty choirboys, a procession of Amazons, and the Battle of Actium. Critics complained about the mix of Shakespeare and spectacle:

  During the first three acts, in which there is "one halfpenny worth" of Shakespearean "bread" to "an intolerable deal of" scenic "sack," the delight of the audience with everything set before it was unbounded. In the concluding act, which was wholly Shakespearean, there was a gradual cooling, and the verdict at the end, though favourable, was far less enthusiastic than it would have been could the play have ended with the fight at Actium...the most dramatic scenes, and the most sublime poetry that the stage has known, proved not only ineffective but wearisome.10

  Beerbohm Tree's production cut the text by a third and focused on the lovers. Most critics again thought the lavish sets overblown--it opened and closed with a "projected dissolving Sphinx"11--but were impressed by his Cleopatra:

  1. Archaeological spectacle: Beerbohm Tree's 1906 production.

  Miss Constance Collier, handsome, dark-skinned, barbaric, dominates the scene wherever she appears. Nor has she ever had a better chance, or more fully availed herself of it, than when in the second act she has to prove how close the tiger's cruelty lies under the sleek skin of the cultivated woman.12

  The theater historian Richard Madeleine suggests that the number of productions and interest in all things Egyptian may have been sparked by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Egypt's subsequent financial and political crisis which resulted in British military intervention and the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885.13 One of the anachronistically named "Cleopatra's needles" had been erected in London in 1878.

  It wasn't until the twentieth century that simpler productions were staged, influenced by the theories of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, who advocated a return to the continuous staging of the Elizabethan theaters. William Bridges-Adams's production for the 1921 Stratford Festival was played with few cuts and only one short interval, but it was Robert Atkins' 1922 "non-stop" production at the Old Vic which decisively affected future staging. The play was popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s, partly thanks to Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 and a continued cultural fascination with Egypt. John Gielgud played a romantic Antony to Dorothy Green's voluptuous Cleopatra with Ralph Richardson as Enobarbus in Harcourt Williams's successful 1930 Old Vic production. This featured semipermanent sets and simple designs inspired by the Renaissance painters Veronese and Tiepolo.

  The expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky's 1936 Stratford-upon-Avon production, on the other hand, ran for only four nights, due in part to his own radical cutting and rearranging of the text, but also to his Cleopatra. The Russian Eugenie Leontovich's pronunciation was mercilessly satirized, although Donald Wolfit's Antony was admired, as was Margaret Rawling's Charmian, praised by the renowned theater critic James Agate for the way she "refrained from wiping Cleopatra off the stage till after she was dead."14

  Glen Byam Shaw's 1946 production at the Piccadilly Theatre used a versatile permanent set consisting of a single solid central "column-tower-monument with a recess beneath reminiscent of 'an air-raid shelter or an elevator with sliding doors.'" The design has been perceived by theater historians as "post-fascist" in that it seemed "to belong to the 'architecture of coercion' that celebrates the centralisation of power and looks back to the monumental forms of the fascist architecture of the thirties."15 Godfrey Tearle and Edith Evans were both praised for their individual performances. The fifty-eight-year-old Evans, playing the part of Cleopatra in a red wig, was described as "best in the raillery and mischief." Both leads were judged "at their best when they are apart."16 Tearle's "rich, resonant voice and noble presence" convinced the London Times reviewer that "for once we have an Antony who is really an old lion dying."17 He went on to play the part the following year opposite Katharine Cornell in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in a record-breaking run, directed by her husband Guthrie McClintic. The production controversially updated and politicized the play: "Shakespeare's soldiers are Nazis, Pompey a Goring, Caesar a Baldur von Schirach, the rank and file a squad of heiling stormtroopers."18

  In 1951 for the Festival of Britain, Michael Benthall alternated Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the St James's Theatre; the leads in both cases were the glamorous celebrity couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The venture was not without problems, as the Oliviers' biographer records:

  The plays as a pair were tremendously successful throughout the London season, and were to repeat that success in New York, but it was really a marriage of incompatibles. Even Michael Benthall's production and Roger Furse's sets, all of which were designed to fuse them into a whole could not disguise the fact that Shaw's comedy was a weak partner.19

  Critics were divided about individual performances. The New York Times was fulsome: "Miss Leigh's Cleopatra is superb...Mr. Olivier's Antony is worthy of her mettle."20 The Commonweal was more cautious:

  Olivier's Antony is not perfect...But it is still a full-scale, clearly defined piece of work, and fascinating to watch. Miss Leigh's task is of a different order. Instead of shifting her entire style from night to night, she must establish a clean line of connection between the two Cleopatras. Since one of these is an inexperienced child and the other quite a calculating woman...she is faced with a considerable challenge...But she succeeds in creating a single, believable, and commanding person, and it is no small accomplishment.21

  The Cambridge scholar and director George "Dadie" Rylands thought that "Laurence Olivier sacrificed Antony to Cleopatra and 'for his ordinary paid his heart.'"22 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."23

  Glen Byam Shaw's second production at Stratford (1953) was praised for the "cinematic celerity"24 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."25 The performances of Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft as the lovers were "still being used as a touchstone forty years later,"26 despite concern that Ashcroft was miscast as Cleopatra: "She is neither physically large enough nor temperamentally earthy enough."27 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."28 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."29

  2. Michael Redgrave as Antony and Peggy Ashcroft as Cl
eopatra 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"30 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."31 Keith Michell's Antony was "not so colossal a wreck as Redgrave's, nor as commanding as Olivier's,"32 but nevertheless bestrid the stage; but Margaret Whiting, despite her raven hair and "shapeliness," failed to "balance majesty with sensuality."33

  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.34 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."35 Christopher Plummer's Antony was seen as the "focus of sympathy," while Zoe Caldwell played Cleopatra "more for our understanding than for our sympathy."36

  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."37 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 Sjoberg'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."38

  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:

  Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench play the title roles as if they were not star actors. There is a moving and painful honesty in these performances: they are fleshy, aging people, both of them attractive and difficult, and they give out a sense of searing, wounded intimacy.39

  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."40 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."41

  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."42

  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."43 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."44 Rylance and the production overcame elements of "campiness" in the final act:

  When he appeared in a simple shift with a rattily shorn head, the audience gasped at his vulnerable appearance. Without the frippery, he seemed neither a man nor a woman but simply a human being ravaged by pain. In her death, utterly still and clothed in gold, as memorable a moment as her silly ones, Rylance's Cleopatra became for the first time in the production a truly regal queen. Cued by Rylance's performance, this all-male production winked at, and then embraced its audience.45

  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:

  This is a self-consciously filmed production rather than an attempt to translate the play via the conventions of television realism. As such it cleverly foregrounds notions of perspective, as we wonder whose version of events we are watching. Suzman gives a look to camera in an early sequence that suggests that ultimately it is hers, and her dignified self-control in death certainly supports this impression.46

  AT THE RSC: SEVEN CLEOPATRAS AND THEIR ANTONYS

  What the real Cleopatra was like we will never know. She certainly wasn't the libertine of the Roman imagination (she was probably celibate for the majority of her adult life). (RSC program note, comparing Cleopatra to the goddess Isis, for Steven Pimlott's 1999 production)

  The great sluts of world drama, from Clytemnestra to Anna Christie, have always puzzled our girls; and an English Cleopatra is a contradiction in terms. (Kenneth Tynan, reviewing Peggy Ashcroft's Cleopatra, Evening Standard, 1 May 1953)

  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 cliched 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."47

  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."48 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)."49 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)."50

  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.51

  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."52 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.