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 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”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 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.”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 J
ane 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 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.”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.
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.53
Not all reviewers were so enthusiastic. One sneered that “Miss Jackson does not register on an emotional level,”54 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.”55 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.”56 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.57
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.”58
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 t
o the total sensuous dependence of infancy.”59
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.60
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:
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