Antony and Cleopatra
Prospect Theatre Company
The Observer

Ever since Tyrone Guthrie first adapted Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall to his own uses, Elizabethan staging has meant platform staging. Thirty years on, the Prospect company at the same address have drawn on another contemporary source, the cockpit. The raised stage has gone, who knows where, and so have the ecclesiastical seats—known, from the sightlines they afforded, as Blind Pews—from which the audience regarded it. We now look down, from hard tip-up chairs, on a square scooped-out space: visible, audible, accessible. 

For Antony and Cleopatra it is backed by what the buffs call ‘the tiring-house façade’ alcoved and balconied. In All for Love, Dryden’s retelling of the same old story, this is encased by what, I suppose, are restoration gates. Pauline Kael once laid it down as one of the few immutable cinematic rules that ‘all pictures set in ancient Egypt are ridiculous’ and Prospect seem, with some reason, to believe the same of plays. So they have costumed each of their shows in the period of its author, with only a top dressing (i.e., the occasional funny hat) of classicism. 

As Dryden’s Antony John Turner resembles, at his first disconsolate appearance, a mad monk with a military past, but soon he is accounted like—prophetically if you examine the dates—James II at the Boyne. The army of Antony assumes, when you see the plays together, almost allegorical significance; with his gear on Alex McCowen as Shakespeare’s warrior seems a different man; if not quite (alas, and now reason on) a different actor. Their respective mistresses get a worse deal from their dressmakers; why can’t they, you wonder, slip into something more comfortable before getting down to empire-toppling?

I cannot altogether blame the designer for the miscarriage of this Antony and Cleopatra but I have to start somewhere. Tony Robertson’s production has its key positions filled by four of our best actors; the fifth, Robert Eddison, is enticingly triple-tongued as Soothsayer, Schoolmaster and Clown. Derek Jacobi’s Caesar and Timothy Wests’ Enobarbus are expected excellence; the former can be faulted only for being too icily politic in his summing up and the latter (a beery ranker instead of the usual staff man) for an undue briskness as commentator, delivering his verdicts witty actors; so of course is Mr. McCowen and the play lacks something in temperamental contract. That he can put his rivals down at the imperial summit is fine; the scenes were Antony is on top give him no trouble. But where Antony is massively careless he is meticulous, substituting an acerbic bonhomie for the mad generosity of the text; he is measured in a play whose teems are oceanic. ‘The flash Egyptians have betrayed me’ is not tragically inevitable but incredulous (like his Misanthrope). 

Many fine actors so miscast would give up on the ghost: Mr. McCowen battles on, meets every challenge, encompasses every rage. Technically he is brilliant but technique cannot bridge the fatal gap between what he says and what he is. 

He also seems on distant terms with Dorothy Tutin’s Cleopatra. Their small quantities of shared stage time are largely devoted to mutual bitching. This of course is in the script, written for conditions which stylised, or just by-passed, displays of heterosexual passion. It may be that to lay the ghost of this play we shall have to call up that of the boy player. That is not a situation about which anyone can feel enthusiastic (though there is a hint of drag about Cleopatra’s be-rouged maids here) so our actresses must continue to work overtime. 

Unfortunately Dorothy Tutin, who looks on paper (and has been proclaimed in this paper) the ideal Cleopatra, goes by the book, and she really succeeds only with the spoilt teasing bits, jumping to wittily unflattering conclusions about her rival Octavia. The last scene is sort-of-impressive but no more; its rhythms when read are so majestic, yet so buoyant, you feel it should play itself. It is therefore of course lethally difficult. 

All for Love is easier because more artificial; you can, as Frank Hauser has done here, go after a style and get it. The costumes help greatly and so do the wigs, I almost wrote Whigs, though Kenneth Gilbert’s honest Ventidius is a solid country Tory. Mr. Eddison’s villainous Alexus is a polite schemer to the manner born; I couldn’t actually follow all his plots but I enjoyed them. Barbara Jefford is an eloquent Queen, though she seemed surprised at just how nice a lady she is meant to be. Dryden’s Cleopatra hardly betrays her lover at all; when she confronts Suzanne Bertish’s blanched, jealous Octavia we get a contest of outraged virtues. There are laughs here I never expected; even Dryden might have got a surprise. 

But the play is Antony’s and Mr. Turner does full justice to Stuart nobility if not always to Stuart wit. (Here oddly enough, Mr. Cowen might have been better suited.) Set against Shakespeare’s most accomplished but not greatest play, Dryden’s though virtuous, seems artificial for reasons that have nothing to do with Augustan decorum; Dryden came to dramatic blank verse too later and had to work at it. His characters talk, not, like Shakespeare’s as they must but as they ought; an air of paraphrase hangs over the play, an air in which succeeding iambic dramas have virtually choked.