Antony and Cleopatra
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Peter Brook’s production of Antony and Cleopatra (Stratford-on-Avon) is an excellent evening’s entertainment; don’t let anyone tell you different. All the same, Tuesday’s audience was definitely underwhelmed.

Mr Brook is now generally felt to have a historic function at Stratford: about once a decade, he arrives and changes everything. This time it seems at first glance that the company has been ahead of him; his production fits as neatly as is possible on that stage into the intimate ‘chamber’ mould that the RSC has pioneered in the Other Place.

But I forget: Mr Brook has already practised this half-way-house staging at the Bouffes-du-Nord in Paris, where his French Timon of Athens was a beautiful piece of storytelling. Using the native text of Antony he is more constricted, though actually the production’s greatest merit is its unremitting concentration on the text- a virtue not uniquely Brookish, but as much to be praised in him as in John Barton or Trevor Nunn within the RSC or Peter Gill (who may well be Mr Brook’s heir) without it.

Sally Jacob’s set is bounded on the sides by movable trestles and at the back by glass screens. It is a set more practical than pretty (and at that it is more attractive than the costumes, which include a generous assortment of striped nightwear and turn at least one attendant Egyptian into a Desert Song Bedouin), but it proves itself in the notoriously difficult monument scenes; with no split level pretences the dying Antony can simply be hauled horizontally to Cleopatra wrapped in her and her women’s scarves.

Earlier, the battle scenes are suggested by the hurling of blood upon the screens- the only stand-out shock effect in the production, unless you count the carousal on Pompey’s galley which works, like some of the best scenes in Evita, by going on just the vital bit longer and more intensely than you would think possible. (Richard Peaslee’s music, here and throughout, has unusual distinction.)

Otherwise the startling moments are all in the acting; they begin when Antony and Enobarbus break into helpless and joyful laughter at the news that Antony’s wife is dead. The episode brands Patrick Stewart’s Enobarbus not (as is usual) as the keeper of his general’s conscience, but as his junior partner in dissipation. ‘Now he’ll outstare the lightening’ is spoken in admiration, even though followed by his realistic plan for desertion. The conflict eventually and graphically kills him. He prefaces his anthology description of Cleopatra with a proprietorial ‘I will tell you’ as who should say, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Even more complex is Jonathan Pryce’s Octavius. Maecenas talks of Caesar seeing himself in Antony’s ‘spacious mirror.’ This is the relationship played by Mr Pryce: at first dazzled by his senior partner, tempted by him into surprising levity: then sobering up in horror, regarding him increasingly as an example to be studied, dreaded and destroyed. ‘He calls me boy,’ he cries exultantly on receiving Antony’s craziest message (and using it as a paper kite): as who should say, he’s really blown it now.

David Suchet, completing a fine season, finds more in Pompey than could have been suspected; he, unlike Caesar, gives way to his own generosity and dies of it. Then there are Paul Brooke’s complacently agreeable Lepidus, Paul Moriarty’s Menas, Paola Dionisotti and Juliet Stevenson as Charmian and Iras, Richard Griffiths unrecognizably straight as Cleopatra’s messenger and himself again as the Clown (the only actors I have known to take Shakespeare as his word and make the asp-man red-nosed funny), Raymond Westwell’s old soldier drawing, or so I guess, on his Churchill at the Other Place. Marjorie Bland’s Octavia is colder than necessary, but really only two performances disappoint. 

You guessed it. It would be presumptuous to dictate terms for the playing of Antony and Cleopatra. But there are clues; both are defined by the other characters’ attitudes towards them. (That is why I have dwelt on the supporting playing; its superb quality is not a luxury but a necessity. All of these actors have at some time to carry the baton.)

The story dictates that almost everyone in the play shall be in thrall to Antony and he to Cleopatra. Here it isn’t believable. Alan Howard gets Antony’s madness (suicidal in his determination to fight ‘by sea, by sea,’ which words he burns up), but not his child - or his god-like magnanimity. He is a loner: still Coriolanus. Glenda Jackson meanwhile is still Elizabeth I, capable of a superb death-scene (she is transformed, as she should be, from the moment she enters the monument) and of a breathtaking thunder-and-lightening transformation when the messenger tells her of Antony’s marriage. (When he flees, she throws a knife after him.) But Cleopatra’s sexuality is left in abeyance, where in fact Shakespeare himself left it. He using the code of the boy-player, could afford to: we cannot.