"Antony" LINKS

RSC
A&C Front Page
Production Photos
Interviews
Stratford Reviews
BA Exclusive

BATES
ARCHIVE

News
In Memoriam

SPOTLIGHTS

Knighthood
American
Film Theatre
Fifties TV
Al Hirschfeld

FEATURES

Biography
Timeline
Photo Gallery
Actors Centre
Piffle
Ephemera

ARCHIVE

Theatre
Film
Television
Audio
Interviews
Writing

QUOTES

"The charisma and magnanimity are still there, along with a sensitivity and reflectiveness missing in almost every Antony..."

The Times

"Alan Bates rumbles and shambles wonderfully as a bibulous Antony..."

Financial Times

[Bates plays] the gruff libertine with bullish defiance and a twinkling relish. He really does give a master class in subtleties of inflection as he bends the great verse to his own personality and charm...

[Cleopatra's] climactic demise - summoning those intimations of immortality with fully naked exposure beneath her golden robe - remains the most powerful version of these scenes I can recall.

Daily Mail

... this fine actor displays his great range, extracting surprising comedy from many of the scenes and producing an extremely moving death scene.

The Stage

... Pimlott's decision to have the dead walk off stage is a potent one, injecting the piece with an alluring spirituality...

Time Out

 t h e a t r e

Miss Jones naked on stage? What would Rigsby say?
Alison Boshoff, Showbusiness Editor
Daily Mail, 1.ii.00

IN SHAKESPEARE'S WORDS, Cleopatra's beauty 'beggared all description.'
Now Frances de la Tour, the latest actress to tackle the role, seems determined to leave her audience lost for words, too.
The 55-year-old appears completely naked on stage during the climactic scenes of the tragedy, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at London's Barbican.
The actress, best known as Rigsby's long-sufferine tenant Miss Jones in ITV sitcom Rising Damp, paints her face, sheds her golden robes, and strides the stage naked. Finally, after putting an asp to her breast to poison herself, she curls up in the middle of a Buddhist circle of salt which she has created, and dies. At the close of the play, the actress walks off the stage, still wearing no clothes.
It is a degree of harsh exposure to the public gaze which few would dare to brave, particularly when they are no longer in the first flush of youth. Yet the actress was apparently keen to expand the mere flash of nudity which the staging of "Antony and Cleopatra" contained when it was performed at Stratford last year into scenes of full frontal nakedess.
A source said: 'She was not naked in Stratford, all she did was suggest a flash with her robes when she put the asp to her breast. But apparently she has been longing to do it. As time has gone on, the nudity has become more and more explicit as her wishes have been included in the staging. It does have an extraordinary impact. I am sure that she was egged on because Helen Mirren took her clothes off at the National Theatre, although in a much more brief way. It was a kind of a dare to anyone who played her next, "How brave are you?"'
An RSC spokesman said: 'Steven Pimlott, the director, and she had a very collaborative relationship. Everything was done with her say-so. She hates to give interviews so she won't talk about it, she would just rather people came to see the play.'
Miss Mirren's nudity in the 1998 version caused a sensation, but it could not save the play from a critical savaging. Her partnership with Alan Rickman was ridiculed for lacking even a hint of sexual chemistry and the entire venture went down in theatrical history as a celebrated fiasco.
The critics have been kinder to Miss de la Tour's efforts with Alan Bates, saying that she has 'touches of greatness' in a moving performance, while Bates as Antony is in 'splendid' form.
The role of Cleopara has defeated and distressed many actresses. Glenda Jackson, who tackled the role in 1978, was told by one critic that her Cleopatra eemed as prone to passion 'as Mrs Thatcher to weeping at Cabinet meetings.' Dame Diana Rigg was compared to an angry headmistress at morning assembly, while Dame Edith Evans's Cleopatra was compared by critic Kenneth Tynan to 'Lady Brackness, cruelly starved of cucumber sandwiches.' Tallulah Bankhead wa dismissed in a one-sentence review: 'Last night she barged down the Nile and sank.'
The physical demands of the role are notorious. Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra when she was at the peak of her beauty, and many actresses think twice before taking on the challenge. When Dame Judi Dench was asked to play Cleopatra by director Peter Hall she said: 'Do you really want a menopausal dwarf as Cleopatra?' He did.
Miss de la Tour has a distinguished stage record, including "Duet for One," written for her by her then husband Tom Kempinski. As well as appearing with Leonard Rossiter in "Rising Damp," her TV work includes an appearance in Dennis Potter's "Cold Lazarus." |||

Noble obliges at the RSC
Benedict Nightingale,
The Times, 21.i.00

Benedict Nightingale finds the Royal Shakespeare Company on dazzling form with "Don Carlos" and "Antony and Cleopatra"

I CANNOT IMAGINE Adrian Noble and Trevor Nunn agreeing to a gentle bout of hand-wrestling, let alone declaring that the RSC and the National must regularly be subjected to rigorous comparison. And if you apply such tests as the winning of awards or the ravings of reviewers, and overlook some dubious choices in the new play department, there's little question that the South Bank has been ahead of late.
Yet the RSC is catching up. Just as Nunn's commitment and skill have forced me to retract the doubts I expressed when he became the National's director, so my less trusting colleagues are having to admit that Noble and his colleagues are producing some fine work. "Othello," "Volpone," Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko" and Ted Hughes's "Tales from Ovid" have all impressed. A dangerously sexy "Midsummer Night's Dream" has thrilled. An energetic if superficial "Macbeth" has delighted my fellow critics. And now, hot from Stratford into (respectively) the Barbican and Pit come a thoroughly decent "Antony and Cleopatra" and a super revival of Schiller's "Don Carlos."
To say that Steven Pimlott's production of Shakespeare's tragedy is stronger than the National's recent counterpart is to say very little. The latter was a celebrated fiasco which came to life only after the death of Alan Rickman's irreparably doleful Antony. How much better it would have been if Helen Mirren's feisty Cleopatra had been paired, as was reportedly planned, with Alan Bates.
But the RSC nabbed that fine actor, cast him opposite Frances de la Tour, and has now brought to London a revival somewhat lacking in sensuality and passion but packed with rueful nostalgia. This emphasis makes a merit of selecting an actress not known for her glamour and an actor who has starred in a hundred Simon Gray plays about the woes of the male menopause.
Their lovers are over the hill and, for all their cuddlings and brief forays into cunnilingus interruptus, they fundamentally know it. De la Tour catches Cleopatra's volatile exhibitionism, displaying affection, caustic command and self-mockery in what sometimes seems like a single moment; but it is vulnerability that finally defines her. The news that her rival Octavia is a mere 30 is a disabling blow, for, whatever Enobarbus says, age has withered her. The woman who waits in a skullcap and blanket to be robed, crowned and painted in readiness for death is what she always was beneath the show: haggard, gaunt, desperately living beyond her chronological means.
That's a moving moment, and Bates offers others. Like de la Tour, he gives us smouldering embers rather than fire. Even his jealous rages and furious disappointments have an elegiac feel. The charisma and magnanimity are still there, along with a sensitivity and reflectiveness missing in almost every Antony; but a wry wistfulness predominates.
Guy Henry's initially insecure, increasingly assertive Octavius is the future. Bates's Antony is the past, a once magnificent warrior-poet whose complaint that his young foe "harps on what I am, not what he knew I was" resounds with impotent regret.
Pimlott's production has its oddities. Dress code in 31BC embraces doublets, Arabic headdresses, jazz-age cocktail dresses, bikers' leathers, even severe futuristic tunics. And the pace is sometimes slow, the verse-speaking over-elaborate. The mirrors towering over a circular stage seem a pretty crude way of signalling the protagonists' narcissism, and the steel sculptings behind them are a half-visible waste of space.
Yet this is one of the RSC's successes: proof that, despite Noble's insistence on sending them on gruelling tours, the company can still attract top-notch performers. |||

Copyright © 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Naked power of a Tour de force
by Michael Coveney
Daily Mail, Friday, January 21, 2000

TWO OF THE GREATEST plays ever written proclaim that the Royal Shakespeare Company is back in business at the Barbican. Last summer's Stratford season, now up and running in London, was one of the best in years.
Questions of policy remain--notably the continuing and scandalous failure to promote new writing on a large scale--but masterpieces sometimes make do.
"Antony and Cleopatra," an amazing poetic tragedy of lust and lost empires, is notoriously difficult to stage. It rarely lives up to its reputation in performance. Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour have enriched their partnership as a last gasp of middle-aged madness, the end of an affair across lost continents. Duty to Rome is forgotten in a miasma of luxuriance in Alexandria.
Steven Pimlott's production, designed by Yolanda Sonnabend on a stage of large mirrors and bargain basement costumes, looks a little cheaper, though just as informal, as at Stratford. This is Shakespeare shopping at Woolworth's, not Harvey Nichols. But the action is clear and fluent, the comedy of Antony's mistimed suicide the best I have seen, and the verse-speaking well up to the current (only average) RSC standard.
Bates begins not with his head in de la Tour's lap (as at Stratford) but more imposingly, playing the gruff libertine with bullish defiance and a twinkling relish. He really does give a master class in subtleties of inflection as he bends the great verse to his own personality and charm offensive.
Miss de la Tour is quirkily skittish, playful and oddly attired in a succession of unflattering silks and shifts. Her sexiness is one of spirit, not of MGM movies, and her climactic demise - summoning those intimations of immortality with fully naked exposure beneath her golden robe - remains the most powerful version of these scenes I can recall.
Malcolm Storry is a moving, breast-beating Enobarbus and Guy Henry an unusually tall and prattish Octavius Caesar.
...The music for both Shakespeare and Schiller is exemplary. Take a well-earned
bow, composers Jason Carr and Gary Yershon. |||

Antony and Cleopatra
Andrew Aldridge
The Stage, 27.i.00

INADVERTENT CLASHING of opposites is typically associated with Shakespearean comedy - think Bottom and Titania, Malvolio and Olivia, Benedick and Beatrice.
In this play, of course, the pairing of the rough, political ruler with the lascivious goddess ends tragically, the bond between Egypt and Rome - and the characters within them - broken by their cross-border relationship.
It is this very sense of fragile mutual dependency that shines through Steven Pimlot's production for the RSC.
Yolanda Sonnabend's design, for example - dominated by three enormous mirrors that play optical games with space and blocking - creates a striking visual metaphor for the tragic effects of misleading information between the empires.
And even something as simple as discerning the character of the two worlds is made difficult by the meandering pace and dim lighting.
Alan Bates, as Mark Antony, and Frances de la Tour, as Cleopatra, are not the lusty, animalistic lovers of legend, and theirs is a romance defined more by lovesickness than an eagerness to please between the sheets.
De la Tour gives a terrifically watchable performance, full of languid sexiness and elegant gesticulations, many of which end on the face of her beloved like a rich widow mothering her favourite tabby.
When we first meet him, Bates' Antony impresses as a swaggering, beer-guzzling warrior. But this fine actor displays his great range, extracting surprising comedy from many of the scenes and producing an extremely moving death scene.
Elsewhere, Guy Henry's Octavius Caesar and Malcolm Storry's Enobarbus are the other contributions of real note. |||

Actors Survive the Gimmicks
Ian Shuttleworth
Financial Times, 21.i.00

STEVEN PIMLOTT'S RSC production of Antony And Cleopatra, which has now entered the Barbican repertoire from Stratford, shows all the defects of Director's Theatre: its strengths are almost entirely those of acting, its weaknesses those of conception.
Alan Bates rumbles and shambles wonderfully as a bibulous Antony who is all too conscious that he has seen better days. So insecure is he, even about his place beside Cleopatra, that Bates's Antony not only has the messenger from Octavius whipped rather than accept his terms of surrender, but then tortures him with repeated, sadistic attentions to the stripes on his back.
Frances de la Tour is a playful, self-dramatising Cleopatra, but maturely sardonic rather than coquettish. Malcolm Storry's Enobarbus speaks with the licensed bluntness of a long-serving lieutenant, but is plainly a man even more ill-at-ease with himself than Antony. Guy Henry's Octavius begins with tedious aridity and rapidly metamorphoses into a cold, hard warrior-politician. These are all first-rate performances.
Preparing for her finale, de la Tour enters bare-faced, so to speak, and dons both formal Pharaonic make-up and golden robe, beneath which she is visibly, even ostentatiously naked. This is the culmination of a vein of imagery of the lovers as self-conscious performers . . . or would be its culmination if Pimlott had not directed his actors, on their characters' deaths, to rise and walk slowly off the stage - backwards, in Antony's case; the deceased Cleopatra is even walked off by Dolabella.
While the symbolism of such a final exit is intellectually understandable, it remains a device more associated with smaller, more constrained companies who need to get their actors off so that they can return in another guise. On the Barbican stage it looks faintly embarrassing.
Yolanda Sonnabend's design, too, emphasises the aspect of staginess, dominating the playing area with three huge semi-transparent mirrors. Indeed, the stage is the only real setting for any of the action; although Sonnabend has constructed galleries and visible closets for actors half-offstage, no other location is even adequately suggested. Scenes in Rome and Egypt alternate in the same space so that at one or two points one loses track of where Antony is actually supposed to be situated.
The final business of Cleopatra immured in her monument - designated, at most, by a "magic circle" of salt on the stage - is at times frankly ludicrous in its inconsistency. Pimlott seems to be demanding that we use our imaginations whilst being unwilling or unable to use his own to resolve such problems; to ask us to accept the story as theatre without paying enough attention himself to the mechanics of its theatricality.
Luckily, the central performances are all powerful enough to counterpoise this High Concept gimmickry. |||

This Cleo is too much to bare
Antony And Cleopatra
by Nicholas de Jongh
The Evening Standard, 20.i.00

NEVER UNTIL last night had I seen a Cleopatra stripped down to such bare essentials. Frances de la Tour, when playing the old serpent of the Nile at Stratford-upon-Avon last summer, applied a face mask and powder to her face before giving vent to Cleopatra's adieux in that lugubrious voice of hers. Having been fatally poisoned by the asp she collapsed, then stood up and left the stage.
That surprising last action was and remains very much part of Steven Pimlott's narrow-minded, and unsatisfying production, transferred to London. We are still asked to see "Antony and Cleopatra" as akin to narcissistic actors who put on a public and self-conscious show of love. Now, however, Miss de la Tour, does her dying act with a difference. Flinging off a golden wrap, she permits a full-frontal flash of her naked form and permits a rear view of her walking off stage in the nude - a case of giving your all for art.
This new denouement emphasises Pimlott's view of "Antony and Cleopatra" as a play which strips away the trappings of power. Both the middle-aged lovers are reduced to the status of actors walking off life's stage and into the dark: by close of play Yolanda Sonnabend's back-cloth of scenery - a view of the world - has vanished.
Cleopatra, and Antony to a far lesser extent, do have the air of lovers putting on a display. No wonder Miss Sonnabend's set primarily consists of three tall transparent mirrors. It emphasises how far the lovers are observed and keep close eyes on their own performances. But Pimlott's torpid production misses the play's hurtling momentum. It ignores the play's crucial sense of lovers so smitten by passion that it loses them reason, empires, alliances and life itself.
Alan Bates has long specialised in giving good irony and Miss de la Tour is admired for her brilliant line in camp mockery and hauteur. So this mercurial Cleopatra, all dressed up in gold, azure blue and blazing temperament relishes and conveys the queen's wit - and more. "Would I had thy inches," she says to Bates's grizzled, cynical Antony, making it clear she does not have his height in mind.
And in her rapt death-ritual she memorably strips the queen down to quiet despair. Yet when it comes to sexual agony and ecstasy the pair often seem misguidedly ironic. "I must from this enchanting queen break off," Bates muses in the tones of a businessman writing up tomorrow's diary.
The play's political aspects are still faint-heartedly done. Only Guy Henry's threatening Octavius keeps up the political edge. Bates does now discover more pain and regret, though his throaty, throttled delivery, forever lunges into bombast [and] reeks of artificiality. But it is Malcolm Storry's self-serving Enobarbus, racked by self-disgust, who sounds the most heartfelt notes in this perverse production. |||

© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 20 January 2000

Antony and Cleopatra
by Madeleine North
Time Out, 25.i.00

... STEVEN PIMLOTT'S persuasive interpretation comes across less as a "Romeo and Juliet" for fortysomethings than a tale of clashing egos. For once Philo's opening description of Antony as nothing but 'the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy's lust' seems entirely justified... Cleopatra is no gypsy (though Frances de la Tour's queen has some inclination to dress like one), but Alan Bates' innately scruffy world leader is wrapped irretrievably around the finger of his wily Egyptian dish. De la Tour wonderfully accentuates Cleopatra's predilection for melodrama: fainting and recovering in one effortless movement. She moves in an aggressive and decdedly un-queenly manner, yet as she pines after 'the demi-Atlas of this earth', she writhes erotically on the floor... Bates plausibly complements this inflamed Cleopatra... Pimlott's decision to have the dead walk off stage is a potent one, injecting the piece with an alluring spirituality... Yolanda Sonnabend's magnificent set of vast reflective glass magnifies a captivating vision of the ego destructively at work. |||