Shakespeare’s Roman plays on stage

Well, I live within reasonable travelling distance of London, so I may as well take advantage of it!

When the Royal Shakespeare Company announced they were performing all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays in the same season, I felt like that proverbial kid in the candy-shop, unable to decide which one to go for. Should I go to see Antony and Cleopatra again? I have admittedly seen it many times before, but I love that play. Or there’s Julius Caesar, a play I was quite obsessed with as a thirteen-year-old – I used, I remember, to read it over and over again, and it is very firmly imprinted in my mind – but, for whatever reason, I had never seen it on stage before. Or there was Coriolanus, which, too, I had never seen on stage: maybe a stage production would help me appreciate better this strange play – Shakespeare’s last tragedy featuring a protagonist who, far from developing into some measure of self-awareness, seems resolutely incapable of any kind of development at all. In the end, the kid in the candy shop realised he couldn’t decide, and spent all his pocket money on all the sweets.

(Well, not perhaps all: Titus Andronicus has never really been a favourite play of mine, but I have not seen this on stage either, and I have received some very fine reports of this production.)

Coriolanus came first. I have always found this a grim and rather severe play. It is one of Shakespeare’s longest, and, lacking as it does a subplot, the focus is insistently, almost oppressively, on its principal character throughout. And this character seems not to have much of an inner life: an unthinking fighting machine, seemingly incapable not merely of subtle or of profound thought, but of any thought at all. And he lacks poetry. The entire play seems to lack poetry: those wonderful lines and passages scattered throughout Shakespeare’s plays that grab you by the throat or make those hairs on the back of your neck stand up with their expressive eloquence and their irresistible verbal music seem very conspicuous here by their absence. Shakespeare obviously knew what he was doing: problem is, I don’t.

The performance didn’t really help. The text was quite severely cut, and as a consequence, lacked the sense of that almost oppressive intensity I seem to detect when I am reading it. Sope Dirisu as Coriolanus didn’t really project any strong personality, or charisma, as I think he ideally needed to. For some reason, the drama somehow failed to grip. Either that, or I just attended a bad night. (I have bad days in the office sometimes: I am sure actors are allowed the occasional bad day on the stage!)

So, basically, Coriolanus remains for me something of a puzzle. But I’ll keep trying.

Next came Antony and Cleopatra, a play I have gone on about quite a bit in various posts here, as it is a firm favourite of mine. It started very promisingly: Josette Simon was a very spirited and vivacious Cleopatra, and Antony Byrne looked just right playing his namesake – a war-hardened soldier who, now advancing in years, is losing it. I particularly liked the way Ben Allen played Octavius – a very young man who nonetheless takes his responsibilities seriously, and who, at the start, idolises Antony as a great soldier, and cannot understand why this once great soldier is no longer living up to his Roman sense of duty. This makes sense of the text. Here, the proposal that Antony marry Octavia is no mere cynical ploy on Octavius’ part: he really wants Antony in his family, and actually believes that the love of a good Roman woman would cure Antony of his Egyptian decadence. So when Antony does return to Cleopatra, Octavius can only take this as a personal insult. And at the same time, his expression of grief on hearing of Antony’s death appears heartfelt, as it was surely intended to be: in too many productions, where Octavius is played as a cynical, manipulative statesman, cold and unfeeling in all his dealings, this scene falls flat, s it is hard to believe that such a man could be capable of such heartfelt emotion. Here, it worked splendidly.

But all was not perfect here either. For one thing, the cuts. I understand that this is a long play, and some cuts are necessary, but here, they did hurt. They cut the scene on the night before the battle where the soldiers on guard duty hear mysterious music coming from under the ground. It is only a short scene, and is very atmospheric: I’m sure it could have stayed. The many battle scenes were considerably thinned out, reducing, I felt, something of the play’s epic dimension. The scene between Cleopatra and her treasurer is cut. And, most grievous of all, I thought, was the excision of that wonderful passage where Antony calls round all his sad captains:

                                            … Come,
Let’s have one other gaudy night: call to me
All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more;
Let’s mock the midnight bell.

I also couldn’t help feeling that they short-changed the poetry somewhat. Among other things, Antony and Cleopatra is full of passages of soaring lyricism: it’s almost as if Shakespeare had poured into this play all the verbal opulence that he so carefully kept out of his very next play Coriolanus. And yet, the beauty of the poetry did not really seem to register. Even Cleopatra’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful lines

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me

seemed  to lack solemn majesty.

It could be argued, of course, that “solemn majesty” is not how Josette Simon sees Cleopatra, and certainly, she has plenty of textual evidence on her side. Perhaps I am bringing too many of my own preconceptions to the proceedings, and that’s never a good thing.

And today, it was Julius Caesar. We read this play at school when I was thirteen, and, contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that Shakespeare in the classroom puts people off for the rest of their lives, I loved it. I think I developed a sort of obsession about it. And, rather strangely perhaps, I remember how I used to regard this play back then. Brutus was my hero, a genuine man of honour, who, quite rightly, acted to protect the Roman people from Caesar’s tyranny, and was defeated by the unscrupulous Antony. Now, while still thinking that Brutus acted with honourable motives, he seems to me something of a self-obsessed prig, continually telling everyone how very honourable he was. Cassius now seems to me more neurotic than I had then thought him. Antony is still unscrupulous, but now, I find myself admiring his extraordinary courage, and his loyalty to the dead Caesar. And Caesar himself I find myself admiring more than I used to. In short, I have grown up, and am more aware of the various ambivalences in all four of these fascinating leading characters.

And I found myself also thinking that while Antony and Cleopatra – written some seven years after Julius Caesar – was not intended as a sequel, the characters of Antony and of Octavius are consistent with what had gone before. Antony’s tiring of his responsibilities in the later play, and wishing only for a life of unthinking hedonism, takes on particularly strong resonance when one knows that Antony had spent his youth in pursuit of pleasure, and had only taken on political and soldierly duties when circumstances had compelled him to do so. The great statesman and soldier we hear of in the later play we see for ourselves in the earlier: and we see also what had driven him to such a life. And in his advancing years, it is his carefree pleasure-filled youth he wishes to return to.

The production, I thought, is tremendous. Alex Waldman plays Brutus here is a self-obsessed prig that I now see him to be, and Martin Hutson’s Cassius is overtly neurotic. Andrew Woodall is a splendid Caesar (he had been an equally splendid Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra) , and the whole thing is staged quite superbly. Best of all, perhaps, was James Corrigan’s dynamic Antony: that great speech scene was every bit as electric as it should be. And for once, they played the text more or less complete, with only the smallest of cuts. (But then again, this is a much shorter play than the other two.)

One thing that struck my fifty-seven-year-old self that I most certainly had not recognised as a thirteen-year-old is that the final act is surprisingly weak. A big battle scene, and a rounding off of the story – all finely executed, sure, but I get the feeling that after the long scene in Brutus’ tent in the fourth act, Shakespeare didn’t really have anything more to add. The final act, in comparison to what had gone before, is perhaps a bit routine. But no matter. Those first four acts are simply extraordinary, and this play will always have a special place in my heart. Why it took me so long to get round to seeing it on stage, I really don’t know.

So should I go and see Titus Andronicus this January? I have never really liked the play, but it is one of the fifteen plays of Shakespeare’s I haven’t yet seen on stage (I was counting them off on my fingers on the train back home), so perhaps I should make the effort. If only to tick it off the list. But something tells me that the boy in the candy-shop has had too much candy already.

Confessions of a culture-vulture

It was Cosi Fan Tutte last night.

Every November, the Glyndebourne Touring Opera give a few performances in nearby Woking, and, almost invariably, they perform a Mozart opera. Which, obviously, is fine by us. Last year, it was Don Giovanni (I reported on that briefly here). I was recovering then from serious illness, and, in my weakened state, was afraid I might fall asleep during the performance; but, in the event, it turned out to be a first step back, as it were, to life: by the end of that performance, I felt less of an invalid, less weighed down by my troubles and worries – in brief, less of a miserable old sod. Those three Mozart-da Ponte operas have that effect on me: no matter how serious the aspects of our humanity they probe into, they elate, they exhilarate.

Take last night’s Cosi Fan Tutte. One of my earliest posts on this blog was about this opera, and I dwelt at some length on how deeply troubling the whole thing was. I cannot think of any other work, in any other artistic medium, that is so exquisitely beautiful, and yet so profoundly troubling. And last night, I felt the full force of this paradox all over again: the music is so perfectly beautiful, that the sense aches at it; and yet it presents a view of ourselves, of us all, that perturbs, and leaves one uneasy. I have read many accounts of this work, and even writers with far greater command than myself of the English language clearly find themselves struggling in trying to describe its effect. It remains elusive: just when you think you have found the key to it, some new detail occurs to you, and the entire edifice you have built for yourself suddenly comes tumbling down. It is hard indeed to account for a work that so entrances with its beauty, and yet so troubles you to your very depths; and which, even despite this troublesome nature, leaves you, somehow, elated by the end.

In other words, it’s a right bugger to blog about. So let’s move on.

One full year on from when I was feeling so sorry for myself and so comfortably self-pitying, I find myself in the midst of a spree of nights out. Last night, as I said, it was Cosi Fan Tutte; last week, it was Handel’s Rodelinda at the English National Opera. This was unplanned: a friend of a friend had an extra ticket which he was willing to see off at a ridiculously low price, and it seemed rude to turn it down. I must confess, though, that I am not really convinced by Baroque opera. Not dramatically, I mean. As I understand it, opera audiences of Handel’s time went to hear fine singing from star singers; and they went for spectacle; but they didn’t really go for what we would nowadays consider drama. So Handel operas tend to consist of a long sequence of solo arias – each very beautiful, and each very expressive, but each rather static, designed as they were for the singers simply to stand-and-deliver. Modern stagings invent various piece of stage business – some ingenious, others (to my mind) a bit pointless, and even a bit silly – to prevent it all becoming a merely a long sequence of dramatically static arias; but I rarely find myself convinced. The ENO production did as good a job as can be imagined, but I don’t think I’d have lost much if it had all been done simply as a concert performance. Certainly, in musical terms, and in terms of their expressive power, the arias themselves are top-drawer stuff, and they were quite beautifully performed; but I still can’t quite see this as drama. However, this is just a personal reaction: aficionados of Baroque opera may well disagree.

And I am also attending a series of concerts given at the Wigmore Hall by the Spanish quartet Cuarteto Casals, covering all of Beethoven’s mighty string quartets. I’ve been to two already, and there is a third concert in early December. We are also going to a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in two weeks’ time, in which a friend of ours is singing in the chorus. (To clarify on this point, when I say “I”, I mean I am going on my own; when I say “we”, I am going with my wife. We share some tastes – we both love Mozart and Verdi, for instance – but not all, and we see little point dragging each other off to events we may not enjoy.)

I will not be writing here about any of these concerts, since I am not really qualified to pass my layman’s opinions on musical matters. But when it comes to dramatic matters … well, truth to tell, I’m not really qualified to write about these matters either; but if I were to keep quiet about everything I am not qualified to comment on, this blog would never even get started. (And in any case, remaining silent when you have nothing much of interest to say would be going very much against the spirit of our times.)

And there’s theatre, of course. The Royal Shakespeare Company will be in London this winter, and they are bringing down from Stratford-on-Avon all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays – Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus has never been amongst my favourite plays, although, given I have never seen it on stage before, I may well go along to have a look come January. More surprisingly, perhaps, I have never seen Julius Caesar or Coriolanus on stage either, and have tickets for both between now and Christmas. And also between now and Christmas, I’ll be seeing Antony and Cleopatra, which I often name as my single favourite Shakespeare play: I find it a hard play to keep away from.

(And speaking of which, the National Theatre promises us an Antony and Cleopatra next year with Ralph Fiennes. It also promises us also Macbeth with Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff. At the same time the Royal Shakespeare Company is also promising us Macbeth, this time with Christopher Ecclestone and Niamh Cusack. Which one will be better? Well, there’s only one way to find out, as Harry Hill might say…)

And if all this weren’t enough, one Sunday in early December, the British Film Institute promises us screenings of all three films comprising Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (which I often regard as possibly cinema’s finest artistic achievement) in newly restored prints. I used to be a very keen film-goer in my student days, but I must admit that this is something that has long fallen by the wayside. However, I have never seen these masterpieces before on the big screen, and this really is very tempting.

So much to see, so little money in the bank…

#Shakespeare400: “Antony and Cleopatra” revisited

Till about 1599, Shakespeare had not seemed particularly interested in the tragic. He had written only two plays that are now classified as tragedies, and one of those was Titus Andronicus, an exercise in Senecan excess that I find difficult to take at all seriously. The other was Romeo and Juliet, a colourful and exuberant work that, some would say, has more in common with the comedies than with the tragedies (in his Prefaces to Shakespeare, Tony Tanner rather mischievously classes it with the comedies). But then, in 1599, it all seemed to change. That year, he wrote As You Like It – to my mind, his last purely comic work, sunny and cloudless, and generally untroubled by dark shadows. And he wrote also Julius Caesar, and Hamlet: not since the Athenian tragedians had the world seen tragic drama of such stature. One more comedy was to follow – Twelfth Night, and that was far from unclouded; then came Othello, King Lear, Macbeth –

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

And in between those dark visions, he wrote a couple of plays that some wags, tongue, one hopes, very much in cheek, have described as “comedies” – Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, plays as murky and as sunless as any ever written. There was also Timon of Athens, a play that has always struck me as an early draft subsequently abandoned, rather than as a fully finished work, and a play in which the darkness of vision is again unmistakable. Only All’s Well That Ends Well seems to radiate a bit of sunshine. Here, Shakespeare seems to be looking forward to the fairy tale world and the vision of reconciliation that are apparent in his late plays. But All’s Well That Ends Well is so conspicuous an exception, that it’s not unfair, I think, to describe it as a sort of anomaly. The imaginative world Shakespeare presented in his plays for over ten or so years is a world so intensely and unremittingly tragic, that we’d have to go back to Aeschylus, to Sophocles and to Euripides to find anything remotely comparable.

What brought about this sudden darkening of vision? True, there had certainly been tragic elements in many of his comedies: Shylock may be seen as a tragic figure; tragedy threatens quite menacingly in Much Ado About Nothing; and the vision of Twelfth Night seems to me much darker than the vision of, say, Romeo and Juliet ever was. And yes, elements of the tragic may also been seen in some of the history plays, most notably Richard II and Richard III. But even so, nothing Shakespeare had written before 1599 could prepare us for what followed. There have been many conjectures, of course, on why his vision so darkened: my own conjecture is that Shakespeare had discovered Homer – Chapman’s translation of The Iliad, the first to appear in English, was published in 1598 – and that this had acted as a catalyst, bringing to the fore of his mind a tragic imagination that had previously been in evidence only intermittently. (Certainly, it seems obvious from Troilus and Cressida that Shakespeare wasn’t unacquainted with Homer.) But there’s little point conjecturing on the matter: we can only remain grateful for, and try to understand, what we have.

Shakespeare’s great series of tragic dramas came to an end rather strangely: after Macbeth, possibly written in 1606, as James Shapiro suggests, Shakespeare wrote two more tragic plays, and he seemed to go out of his way to make them unlike the tragedies that had gone before, and also as unlike each other as was possible. One was Coriolanus, an austere monolith of a play, with all lyricism stripped away, and featuring at its centre a beef-witted hunk, a mere fighting machine incapable even of growing into self-awareness. Even subplots that might have provided some welcome relief and contrast are absent. And the other play was Antony and Cleopatra, into which Shakespeare poured in all the richness and opulence, all the lyricism and ebullience that he had been so much at pains to keep out of Coriolanus. Speaking for myself, Coriolanus is a play I respect, but it has never come close to capturing my imagination; Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, is the play I frequently cite as being my favourite of the entire Shakespearean canon.

And the differences between this and the earlier tragedies could hardly be more apparent. In the very opening scene, two Romans speak of Antony in disparaging terms: yes, he had once been a great soldier, but now he is but “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy’s lust”. Not the way we’d expect a tragic protagonist to be talked about, especially in the first scene: first impressions are, after all, always important, and if the protagonists are presented from the very start as a lustful gipsy and her comically besotted paramour, it would become very difficult to establish afterwards their tragic stature. But Shakespeare goes a step further: after we have heard the two Romans, Antony and Cleopatra themselves enter the stage, and, far from showing us some aspects that may lend credibility to their being figures worthy of tragic greatness, they but confirm what we have heard of them. Shakespeare presents his tragic protagonists as essentially absurd. He shows us two middle-aged people, one a queen and the other one of the three most powerful men in the world, wilfully neglecting their duties and responsibilities, and acting like lovesick teenagers. This is the challenge Shakespeare sets himself: how can you present characters as essentially absurd and comic, and yet convince the audience that they are worthy tragic protagonists?

What unfolds is a drama on the vastest of scales, the many scenes – no other play has nearly so many scenes – cutting with an almost reckless abandon across continents, changing moods taffeta-like from minute to minute, ranging from scenes of the most tender intimacy to vast panoramas of diplomatic manoeuvres, wild parties, blood-soaked battlefields. This is the big Hollywood spectacular avant la lettre. And it is all clothed in a poetry that is so sumptuous and luxuriant, and, by the end, so heart-rendingly beautiful, that it takes the breath away. When W. H. Auden edited an anthology of English poetry, he included this entire play.

It would have been easy for all this spectacle to have overwhelmed the characters, but Shakespeare, certainly by this stage of his career, was too good a dramatist to allow that to happen. Cleopatra is the queen of Egypt, and she had maintained her power through careful and well-practised use of her sexuality, unerringly capturing with her wiles the men she needed most to capture; but now, she is middle-aged, and aware of her declining powers. And also, she is in love, possibly for the very first time, and is terrified that she will not be able to hold on to the man she cannot now even contemplate losing. Antony too is middle-aged: in his time, he had been a great soldier, and a great statesman; he had carried out his duties and his responsibilities with diligence, and with honour. But he is tired of all that: his weary and battered spirit now craves only pleasure – with excessive feasting and more than excessive drinking, and with the sensual delights in Cleopatra’s arms. Whatever greatness these two characters may previously have possessed, we don’t see much of it here.

We do, however, see and hear enough to recognise Cleopatra’s irresistible appeal, her “infinite variety”. Even the cynical old soldier Enobarbus seems utterly besotted:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

Such a description makes it virtually impossible for even the best of actors to do justice to her: how does open portray a person so charismatic and irresistible that even “the vilest things” seem but to make her more attractive? I suppose it’s best to let Shakespeare’s miraculous dramatic verse do much of the work, but it can’t be easy. For “the vilest things” in Cleopatra are indeed pretty vile. She is utterly egotistic and self-obsessed, and seemingly unaware of her duties and responsibilities (she is, after all, a queen!); she is spoilt, and is deeply manipulative; and there is something about her nature that seems irredeemably shallow: the rest of the world can go to hell as far as she is concerned as long as she gets what she wants.

Antony seems little better suited to take on a tragic role. Once again, whatever he may have been in the past, what we see of him is a man who seeks little other than personal pleasure, whose sense of duty visibly erodes as the play progresses, whose judgement seems increasingly pickled in excessive amounts of alcohol. By the time he meets his death, the only self-awareness he seems to have acquired is his awareness that he doesn’t understand himself, and that he never had.

More unpromising material for tragic protagonists cannot be imagined. There seems little of the stature that we find even in a mass-murderer such as Macbeth, who, even in the deepest pit of moral depravity, retains an awareness of what has been lost, of what might have been. Sometimes, I can’t help wondering whether Antony and Cleopatra are tragic at all: do we really feel any sense of loss when they die, as we do with Hamlet, or with Othello, or even with Macbeth? These are people who, used as they have been to power and status, cannot possibly live as private citizens; and yet, they are neither sufficiently competent nor sufficiently responsible to be rulers; is not death the best thing for them, and indeed, for everyone else? Perhaps. But, by some alchemy that I have tried hard over many years to understand, Shakespeare raises these two deeply inadequate human beings to the status of gods. By the final act, we are presented with the solemn majesty of death itself, and of two people who willingly venture into that unknown land to discover a union, a consummation, that is not possible in their earthly lives. In weak humanity, defective and irreparably damaged, Shakespeare finds the divine. And I don’t know how he does it. After a while, I content myself merely to stare and to wonder.

As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle –

It’s always difficult to answer the question “Which is our favourite Shaespeare play?” but, more often than not, I reply Antony and Cleopatra. I love it beyond all bounds. I love those rich colours filling its vast canvas; I love its overflowing exuberance, its willingness to see humanity with all its flaws and defects and still discern in it the godlike. Could this be the same writer, I wonder, who, only a few years earlier, had written the bitter and angry Troilus and Cressida? That too was a masterpiece, but while that had left us in despair at the human condition, this play, written at the end of Shakespeare’s long tragic journey, seems reconciled to humanity, accepting of what it is. When I go to my shelf containing all the Shakespeare plays, it is generally for this one I reach first.

“Antony and Cleopatra”, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2012

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

Chichester Festival Theatre (co-production with Everyman Theatre, Liverpool), 2012, featuring Michael Pennington as Antony and Kim Cattrall as Cleopatra, directed by Janet Suzman

The first and biggest surprise came even before we’d entered the theatre: posters advertising the production featured Michael Pennington as Antony, and, instead of the vigorous middle-aged man beginning to decline into the vale of years that I, for one, usually expect to see in this role, we were presented with a man who is already very much declined: Antony here is an old man with a leonine snow-white mane of hair and beard, glowering at us in truculent defiance. This is not how I had previously pictured Antony: had I not known which play this poster was advertising, I would have suspected King Lear.

Opposite Michael Pennington is the extremely glamorous presence of Kim Cattrall, seemingly unwithered by age, but, perhaps, lacking something of that infinite variety Enobarbus speaks of. But then again, it is not possible for any actress to present that fabulous, endlessly fascinating creature that Shakespeare had written. Indeed, I often wonder whether Shakespeare, a practical man of the theatre, had actually expected this character to be depicted as she is described:

I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.
…
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

Now, who could possibly live up to this? But then, this is a play in which lays bare the gap between soaring poetic imagination and flawed mediocrity of mere mortals: possibly, Shakespeare didn’t expect anyone to live up to Enobarbus’ depiction: rather, he wanted his audience to contemplate this gap, perhaps even to laugh at it, and yet, at the same time, learn not to be disgusted by the flawed mediocrity, and also to wonder at the sheer power of the human imagination that could transcend it. For, increasingly, it is this transcendence that seems to me to be at the heart of this extraordinary play.

Antony, when he first see him here, dances awkwardly towards Cleopatra, a ludicrous figure, a man who, like Lear, has but slenderly known himself. But unlike Lear, Antony, even at the end, does not quite know himself. When he has to ponder on what really he is, he confesses to being puzzled: he is like those clouds that constantly change shape, as “indistinct as water is in water” – he cannot hold his “visible shape”. Like Coriolanus, that other tragic protagonist of late Shakespearean tragedy, this is a man who is lacking in thought, lacking in self-awareness; and, as his mortality draws close, he is puzzled.

Usually, Antony is presented as a man who, in his late middle age, is tired of all his responsibilities, and seeks nothing more than the pleasure of lying in Cleopatra’s arms: but the extreme age of Antony in this production somewhat changes this. Here, we have an old man who has not outgrown the habits of youth, and who doesn’t realise how absurd those youthful habits are in venerable old age. When, later in the play, Antony imagines sporting with Cleopatra after death in the Elysian fields, he cannot resist reverting momentarily to his dance, forgetting for one brief second the grim reality of the present: the afterlife awaits, and for Antony, the rest is not the silence that Hamlet imagines, nor the damnation that Othello knows he cannot escape: Antony’s rest is but an eternity of youthful dancing in his beloved’s arms.

And yet, Antony seems to love Cleopatra more when she is absent than when she is with him. When they are together, they merely mouth to each other banalities:

There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

Thou art
The armourer of my heart.

Even when Cleopatra bursts into those miraculous lines

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven

she is speaking in the past tense, and is upbraiding Antony. They both speak magnificent love poetry – some of the very finest in the whole range of literature – but rarely to each other. And this production, more than any other I have seen, made me wonder precisely what these two characters feel for each other. That there is a powerful attraction between the two cannot be doubted; but, perhaps, it is not as all-consuming as either may like to think.

Kim Cattrall does not have the variety of vocal delivery that one may ideally wish for in this role, but she conveys, nonetheless, a person who, like Antony, cannot even begin to understand herself. Director Janet Suzman, herself a famous Cleopatra in the legendary Trevor Nunn production in 1973, speaks of Cleopatra’s political nous, but it’s hard to discern much evidence of it in this production: this Cleopatra mechanically signs documents placed before her without even looking at them, and shows no interest whatever in affairs of state. Or even the state of her own battleships, as she calmly assures Antony that she has “sixty sails, Caesar none better”. Antony is a character who had once, at least, taken his responsibilities seriously: even the very serious-minded Octavius can barely contain his admiration for Antony’s past acts of heroism. But there is no suggestion in Kim Cattrall’s Cleopatra of someone who had ever taken her responsibilities at all seriously. It is easy to side with the lovers against the cold pragmatism of Octavius, but Octavius is a leader who can at least consider seriously the concept of “universal peace”: all Antony and Cleopatra seem able to consider by the end of their lives is walking for ever hand in hand in paradise.

Octavius is a difficult character to bring off. He seems to embody all the virtues of puritanism – hard work, abstinence, discipline – all those virtues that are so necessary for the well-being of the world; but he is devoid of poetry, incapable of deriving any pleasure in being alive. In the banquet scene on Pompey’s barge, Antony advises the young Octavius to be a “child of the time”: Octavius’ brief answer – “possess it, rather” – is chilling. Sadly, and inexplicably, this brief reply is cut in this production, but it crystallises perfectly very differing perspectives in life of the two characters. It is Antony’s perspective that is, inevitably, the more attractive, but it is a mistake, I feel, to present Octavius merely as an unfeeling killjoy: his perspective, whether we like it or not, has validity also. Martin Hutson presents Octavius as, by nature, a very passionate man, but also as a man who knows that he needs to curb that passion: thus, his grief on hearing of the death of Antony, emerges, as it should, as a genuinely heartfelt lament, and not merely as an embarrassing piece of cant. This Octavius is also, at least to begin with, in awe of Antony, and conscious of his own lack of stature in Antony’s presence: in the conference scene in Act 2, he is both angry with Antony, and yet, at the same time, somewhat intimidated by his rival’s very presence. If Antony is an old man still playing at being young, Octavius is a youngster – and very recognisably a youngster – who, despite his inexperience, understands what his duty entails, and who spurs himself, though not always very successfully, to rise to it. Meanwhile Antony, without any self-awareness or self-restraint at all, sinks into mere unthinking hedonism and bluster. Octavius may still not be a likable character, but nonetheless, he demands our respect. It is a marvellous performance.

Only Enobarbus disappoints – rather surprisingly, given that it is performed by the experience old hand Ian Hogg. His big speeches about Cleopatra should ideally be spoken with a relish indicating Enobarbus’ own infatuation with the Egyptian queen, but here, they pass for very little. Neither his desertion of Antony, nor his remorseful death, makes the dramatic impact it should.

As for the production itself, it may be described by those sympathetic to it as “uncluttered”, and those less sympathetic to it as “bland”. The sets, on two levels, are mainly functional; and one could certainly have wished for a bit more imagination in the Egyptian scenes, which appeared here to be taking place in some tacky night-club with a few Oriental trappings. But the main thing, for me, is that there was no eccentricity or quirkiness to distract from those glorious words: it is in those words, after all, that the drama is contained, and I much prefer a functional production, such as this, that doesn’t obscure the language, to some grand directorial statement in which Shakespeare’s language and construction take second place. Others who prefer the director and designer to show stronger hands may disagree.

But what drama it is! I really do not know why this play appears to obsess me so much (I have written about it here, here, and here), but even mediocre performances can leave me breathless with excitement. It is a play in which two deeply flawed and frankly rather ordinary people are raised to the most exalted level by the sheer power of Shakespeare’s soaring, poetic imagination. This particular production may not go down in theatrical history as, say, Trevor Nunn’s 1973 RSC production, but I left the theatre last night feeling exhilarated.