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t
h e a t r e
Antony and Cleopatra
Stratford Reviews
Clive Barnes
Senior Drama Critic, the New York Post (excerpt from "Great
Shakes and Small")
Sunday Theater View, 19 September 1999
 "...The
RSC itself is only a 2-1/2-hour rail journey away from London
in its other -- and original -- home in Stratford-on-Avon [sic],
where Shakespeare remains the major cottage industry. During
a recent visit, I caught back-to-back performances of "Antony
and Cleopatra" and "Othello" without even staying
overnight.
 With these, plus another, very
differently styled performance of "Antony" at the Globe
and a remarkable chamber production of "The Merchant of
Venice" at the National Theatre, I felt I had had a representative
taste of British Shakespeare on the cusp of the century.
"Antony and Cleopatra"
is an extraordinarily difficult play to stage convincingly. It
is almost casually constructed -- the two main characters are
bereft of soliloquies, so although we see them in action, we
have to guess their inner thoughts and motives. And though there
are plumply rewarding roles for Enobarbus and Octavius Caesar,
the rest of the crew, Roman and Egyptian alike, is given short
shrift.
At 65, Alan Bates became the
oldest Antony in my experience. (Godfrey Tearle -- my first and,
in many respects, my best Antony -- was a mere 62 when he played
opposite Edith Evans' equally mature Cleopatra in 1946.) But
Shakespeare does describe Antony as "grizzl'd" and
later as "that old ruffian," and the chance to see
this extraordinary actor in an unhappily rare excursion into
Shakespeare was irresistable.
His Antony had a fine and antic
madness -- a go-for-broke desperation coupled with a crumpled
heroism. Bates also showed a thoughtfulness for the poetry that
recalled Michael Redgrave's memorable Antony, and he found a
perfect match in the ambiguous, sensual and uncommonly alluring
Cleopatra of Frances de la Tour -- also not in her first youth.
The other "Antony and Cleopatra"
at the Globe should have been renamed "Cleopatra and Cleopatra."
This season, the Globe company is experimenting with staging
Shakespeare with an all-male cast dressed in handsome Elizabethan
costumes, as was done in Shakespeare's time. Back then, however,
the "women" were played by pre-adolescent boys; here,
they are fully grown men, which creates a sense of drag rather
than convention.
Rylance, the company manager
and a splendid actor, has surrounded himself with mediocre players.
Rylance plays Cleopatra -- and he is terrific.
Actually, he always is. His line
readings are sometimes bizarre but singularly provocative, while
his feel for the poetry and his innate sense of character make
him one of Britain's finest Shakespeareans.
But it would be more interesting
if he played with actors of his own bright mettle. Say he had
settled for Antony -- it's not a bad part -- and lured Sam Wanamaker's
daughter Zoe to play Cleopatra. That would have been even more
fun!" ...
Benedict Nightingale
The New York Times (excerpt from "A London Season as Unsettling
as the Weather")
Sunday, 29 August 1999
  "...
there is much to be said for Mark Rylance's disconcertingly girlish
yet often forceful Queen of the Nile at Shakespeare's Globe,
and for Frances de la Tour's caustic performance of the same
role in Stratford. When the second of these Cleopatras is mourning
the death of Alan Bates' Antony, one might even talk of a de
la Tour de force.
"...Giles Block's all-male production [at the Globe]
doesn't altogether help here, for the lifting of the dying hero
up to Cleopatra's monument is inadvertently hilarious, with the
captured queen of the Nile and a big, beefy Charmian hauling
at the rope as if they were energetically raising the mainsail
on some unwieldy galleon.
After that, the opening-night
audience clearly found it tough to continue suspending its disbelief
in a male heroine, for, fairly or unfairly, there was still the
odd giggle when Rylance removed his wig -- to reveal a bald,
scrofulous scalp beneath -- replaced it with a pharaoh's shimmering
band and made an honorable stab at a regal death.
There were, however, no sniggers
when Frances de la Tour did much the same for the Royal Shakespeare
Company. Indeed, her whole performance had been moving toward
the moment when, stricken by Antony's death and her own capture,
she sat in a skullcap before a mirror, making up a face that
suddenly looked blanched, ravaged and old. At that moment her
Cleopatra was revealed as a woman for whom looks, life, even
love have largely been a piece of brilliant play-acting. Hers
is a wry, wary queen, always more in control of her emotions
than she likes to pretend, and more impressively partnered than
Mark Rylance is by Shelley's overgenial Antony.
Right from this production's
mildly shocking opening, when he lifts a bleary face from between
Ms. de la Tour's knees, Alan Bates makes it clear that Antony
is no longer the power that he was and, what is more, that he
knows and feels it. Again and again, under Steven Pimlott's direction,
he tries to recover himself, and again and again a combination
of age and sottishness pre-empts him. Partly as a result, some
of the comedy is missing, but the pathos and even some of the
tragedy are there.
After all, what is sadder than
the fading bravado of a once-charismatic roue? Or than the attempts
of an exhausted woman to sustain her mystique? At Stratford that
is a lot clearer than at the Globe."
Michael Coveney
The Daily Mail (full review)
Thursday, 24 June 1999
SHAKESPEARE'S in luck. Both of our major companies have wonderful
new productions on the boil in a momentous week for the bard
of Avon.
 Alan
Bates, as Antony, has kept a date with destiny as the greatest
warrior poet of them all. Speculation was rife as to exactly
how chemical would be his relationship with the Cleopatra of
Frances de la Tour.
But Bates is gloriously reinstated
as a major classical actor. And Miss de la Tour is on blistering
form.
Angular, funny, queenly of voice
and gesture, she summons those immortal longings like a Buddhist
hermit, stripped to her hair-net and brown cloak before assuming
the golden garb of greatness.
Rather like Dame Judi Dench in
"Amy's View," she shows us the preparation for the
role, applying the make-up as she envisages some ghastly showbiz
humiliation in Pompey's march through Syria.
This is the most riveting
last hour of farewell and lamentation I have experienced at this
play.
Steven Pimlott's production is
full of interesting ideas and stark staging, with excellent brassy
music by Jason Carr and some lovely silken costumes by Yolanda
Sonnabend. The luxuriance of Alexandria is well contrasted with
the black leather brutality of Rome, personified in the speechifying
prig of Guy Henry's sinister Octavius Caesar.
This magnificent epic poem is
often hindered in the staging. But a fluid design of three tilted
mirrors and geometric patterns beyond lends cinematic speed to
this always difficult but magnificent epic tragecy.
There is a wonderful Enobarbus
from Malcolm Storry, describing over the dinner table the barge
she sat in and beating his chest in remorse after switching loyalties.
Mr Bates's quicksilver speech
and darting thought sets the tempo. He starts with his head in
Cleopatra's lap and ends lost in her arms. He has kissed away
kingdoms and provinces -- and triumphed all the same.
Charles Spencer
The Daily Telegraph (excerpt)
Friday, 25 June 1999
BATES is on splendid form... I can't remember such
a blearily boozy Antony, and Bates poignantly captures the physical
frailty of a lifelong hell-raiser who is feeling his age. There
is a real sense of a man who knows that this is his last chance
of love, and Bates reaches to the poetic heart of the great
scene in which this weary warrior finally admits that the long
day's work is done.
De La Tour might seem improbably
cast as Cleopatra yet she is an actress capable of glowing allure,
which she uses to fine effect here. Wrapped in little more than
a sheet, she's a sexy, throaty Cleopatra ... funny, perverse
and blessed with a lovely sense of irony. ...Among the supporting
performers, Malcolm Storry's harrowingly anguished Enobarbus
and Guy Henry's lugubrious, touching Octavius are first-rate.
|||
The price isn't
right
John Peter
The Sunday Times (full review)
Sunday, 27 June 1999
[The first half of Peter's review dealt with Trevor Nunn's
current production of "The Merchant of Venice" at the
National Theatre. "Both the National and the RSC are tackling
difficult Shakespeares, with revealing results."]
SEEING "Antony and Cleopatra" (RST, Stratford) just
a few days later, you'll realise that this, too, is a tragedy
of values: those of power and love. Antony and Cleopatra attempt
to hold both and it destroys them. Enobarbus dies because choosing
one over the other is more than he can bear. Octavius survives
because his soul has enough steel in it to choose power over
affection.
He gets the most original performance
in Steven Pimlott's production. Guy Henry plays him as a cautious,
fastidious, inward-looking young man who loves the older, more
glamorous Antony: you sense that Antony could be a father figure
for him, perhaps to replace his dead mentor, Julius Caesar. Instead
of the cold political operator, Henry plays a man of strong but
controlled feelings: his victory gives him private grief and
he almost regrets that finally he proves to be the stronger.
Passion
Pimlott's production opens unpromisingly.
"Look where they come," says a soldier, and so they
do: the stage crowd parts to reveal Alan Bates's Antony vigorously
performing cunnilingus on Frances de la Tour's semi-recumbent
Cleopatra. This infantile director's gesture is like a pretentious
designer label, shouting: Look what I can do! This is adult sex!
It was me who thought of this!
It takes huge authority for actors
to recover from such a scene. Bates is an ageing war god. His
Antony is "an emperor and a Jove," but also Octavius's
"old ruffian": a fighter whose mercurial temperament
and vulnerability make him both Cleopatra's king and her slave.
The vast, curled head is proud but boyish, and you can see how
he struggles with the passion that he half knows will destroy
him.
Desperation
There is something thrilling
but sad about this couple. In everything they say and do together
there is a profound sensual and emotional excitement: a sense
of need but also a sense of desperation as if the years were
fast running out. De la Tour is commanding and tempestuous, but
neither quite the empress nor quite the fishwife: almost a middle-class
Cleopatra, with an eye for decorum. Her voice has passion and
feeling, but little variety of colour: it does not make dramatic
music.
Malcolm Storry plays a huge,
soldierly Enobarbus, gravely and broodingly spoken; but his death
scene is fudged because he simply gets up and walks off. So does
everybody who dies: Agrippa, Iras, Charmian, Antony and Cleopatra.
This is a dull, modernist device, and it makes it look as if
Pimlott were afraid of emotion, or worse, despised it (they are
often the same thing).
In her final scene, Cleopatra
is like a tired actress in her dressing room. Time, love and
defeat have ravaged her face, and she knows that she is both
paying for her life and fulfilling her fate. This is what makes
the play a tragedy and gives de la Tour's performance a touch
of greatness. |||
© 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Throwing glory
to the winds
Alastair Macaulay
The Financial Times (full review)
Friday, 25 June 1999
 WHAT is death but
a final exit? And what is this life but an ante-room - indeed,
a dressing room, with all the men and women merely players?
In the Royal Shakespeare Company's
new production of Antony and Cleopatra, designed with grand simplicity
by Yolanda Sonnabend and directed by Steven Pimlott, 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 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 blank
brick back wall of the theatre. This world was just the theatre;
and, in the moment of death, the actors depart into the darkness
of the wings.
Cleopatra, whose preparation
for death is the most prolonged, first strips away her make-up,
like an actor preparing, and then applies a new Egyptian mummy
mask as she readies herself to meet, in this world, history,
and, in the next world, Antony.
What all this serves to reveal
is that Shakespeare addresses death in this play as he does nowhere
else. But the one abiding value is love, Romantic love in its
full adulterous force, the value that changes all others. And,
with hindsight, we feel how we have been prepared for this love-made
change in the values of Antony and Cleopatra from the opening
speech of the play on. Philo speaks of "this dotage of our
general" and then says "You shall see in him/ The triple
pillar of the world transform'd/ Into a strumpet's fool."
In this production, Philo speaks these lines to us, the audience;
what we then see is Antony with his head buried deep between
Cleopatra's legs.
But is she a strumpet? And is
he a fool? Shakespeare makes Cleopatra and Antony radically real,
showing them to us from one angle after another: shows them weak
and changeable and hypocritical as well as grand and witty and
visionary.
If you feel Cleopatra must be
an icon of perfect beauty and glamour, then Frances de la Tour
is not for you. In truth, de la Tour's sad belle laide
bloodhound face sometimes does look wrong -- but in her expansive
body-language, her wordly-wise voice, and, above all, in her
assured way with the lines, she takes to Cleopatra as to her
native element. She has the caustic humour and the grand
manner, the sluttish ways and the vaulting intelligence. Right
up to the last, we are enthralled by the shifting temper of her
mind.
Alan Bates, playing Antony, is
at present a little too restless, and his consonants are among
the muzziest in the cast. And yet how utterly right he is
for the role. Because he has been a star for decades, we
feel we know him, just as we know Antony as a world hero at the
start of the play. Effortlessly he catches Antony the
happy, powerful voluptuary, the general undone by love -- and
also the unhappy vein in Antony of self-criticism, that turns
in due course to a vein of self-loathing.
All these elements co-exist
in him, along with a wholly disarming capacity for passionate
tenderness. How softly, how beautifully he suddenly returns
us to the play's central dilemma - worldly glory or love? --
as he says "Fall not a tear, I say, one of them rates/ All
that is won and lost." And then he brings us the buried
rhyme in "Give me a kiss,/ Even this" - and now his
voice changes - "repays me." I had not anticipated
that Pimlott or de la Tour or Bates would be right for this play;
and it is a pleasure to be found wrong. |||
 Jeremy
Kingston
The Times (excerpt)
Friday, 25 June 1999
DE la Tour is not a classic beauty but in her kingfisher blue
robes she becomes regal, exotic and, like all the best exotic
queens, unpredictable. Scholars of the text will know what
Cleopatra is going to say next but not how de la Tour will say
it... Bates's Antony, almost always untidily dressed, and either
holding a cup of wine or calling out for one, is grandly grizzled
...this production finds its way to many of the play's complicated
truths. |||
Susannah Clapp
The Observer (excerpt)
Sunday, 27 June 1999
...AS Enobarbus, Malcolm Storey magnificently suggests what
the couple have thrown away. He begins as a powerful, clear-sighted
lieutenant and ends as a self-lacerating defector. When he talks
of Antony, 'thou mine of bounty', he stresses 'mine' so that
the word reverberates both with intimacy and depth, as if to
say that Antony and his riches belong to Enobarbus. |||
 Nicholas de Jongh
The Evening Standard (excerpt)
Thursday, 24 June 1999
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. Yolanda Sonnabend's
set, with costumes running from ancient to modern, faithfully
reflects the director's conception... The bareish stage, with
a 10-strong band of musicians often in evidence, is significantly
dominated by a trio of mirrors, which keep reminding us how self-absorbed
and self-regarding these mature lovers are...|||
Michael Billington
The Guardian (excerpt)
Friday, 25 June 1999
THIS Antony and Cleopatra is certainly better than the National's
recent effort, which barged down the Nile and sank. Pimlott's
production has a lot going for it. For a start, Yolanda Sonnabend
has designed a beguiling space that effortlessly contains both
Rome and Alexandria: three tilted mirrors in the foreground,
an elliptical astrolabe in the background. It both implies the
characters' narcissism and Shakespeare's cosmic range and allows
the action to move fluently. Even the leather bikers' kit for
the Romans and fluid silks for the Egyptians, possess a timeless
charm.... Bates plays Antony as a grizzled
ruffian with a big heart. He even shows compassion to the
discarded Octavia. But he tends to play the emotion behind the
words rather than the words themselves. ...a production that
moves fast, looks good and seeks to offer, in the words of Janet
Adelman, "a tragic experience embedded in a comic structure".|||
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