Antony and Cleopatra
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

One of the problems with Antony and Cleopatra is that though a lot of things happen, very little changes. True, there is the little matter of an adjustment in the balance of the power over most of the known world, but even that is a foregone conclusion.

When the play starts, Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar are officially joint rulers of Rome and its dominions. But Antony, spending all his time playing around in Egypt, has already effectively abdicated. He rallies and struggles as the play proceeds, but his political position is at the mercy of his passion for Cleopatra, and that never alters. Neither, mercurial as she may be, does hers for him.

So the challenge is to keep us interested in the ebbs and flows. Martha Henry at Stratford gives us an intimate staging in one of the Festival's smaller spaces, though at times it seems to be aping the epic as far as is possible; soldiers, in the play's innumerable battle scenes, march up, down and around, much as they would probably do on the main stage.

There are some cliches and rough edges, and most of the supporting acting is inexplicably (and inexcusably) dull, but the gains outweigh the losses. We can concentrate on the people, and together or apart the two leading players stand, and eventually fall, in triumph.

Peter Donaldson's Antony is a man with a past, and knows it. He wants everyone else to know it too, and -- depending on the circumstances -- to adore him for it or to commiserate with him. Sartorially or cosmetically, he has few pretensions; he goes through the play in a brown jerkin, and when he speaks of "this grizzled head" (laying it, in a moment of operatic self-pity, on a block) he is being precisely accurate. But then this Antony doesn't need to dress up to convey authority; he really was what everyone says he was -- the great general, the charismatic politician -- and inside himself he still is. Only time and desire have changed the game and left him stranded.

This is a superbly clear performance. Donaldson's searching, decisive manner of speech is equally an asset to him as an actor, to us as an audience and to Antony as a character. Given a chance to command, he takes it, whether hoisting Cleo on his shoulder for a night on the town or sweet-talking Caesar or Pompey at a summit conference.

But his age betrays him twice over: In his refusal, born partly of fear, to take young Octavius seriously as a political rival, and in his knowledge that Cleopatra is his last great fling, causing him to cling to her desperately. He is shamefully convincing in his sadistic rage when she flirts with Caesar's ambassador, and he hits the very nerve of Antony when he pours out his thanks to his servants -- partly because he really means it, and partly (as Enobarbus sardonically comments) because it's good for his image. The same double instinct is at work in his, initially botched, suicide.

The only thing the performance lacks is the capacity for excess; when Antony calls Cleopatra "triple-turned whore" or calls for "one more gaudy night," the words don't pull their weight. This keeps him from being a great, as opposed to a very fine, Antony. Theatrical history, though, suggests there may never have been a great Antony, with the possible exception of Michael Redgrave; and even fine ones are rare enough to treasure.

Diane D'Aquila's Cleopatra is another very lucid performance, perhaps too much so: Hers is a brilliant surface that never cracks. She shows us, skillfully, how her need for Antony parallels his for her; handsome and vocally sultry, she's younger than he but still aging, and she obviously feels vulnerable.

All the domestic details of their relationship -- the opening flirtation, the jealous banter, her fastening him into his armour -- are perfectly done. But this Cleopatra is too much the lady; she can't muster the fishwife's fury with which Cleopatra greets the news of Antony's marriage; the messenger should tremble for his life, and this one has no occasion to.

In the last act, where she assumes the mantle of Antony's Roman honour -- or where she helps herself to his image, he having no further use for it -- there is no transcendence; she simply glides through it.

Maybe this is right. Maybe Cleopatra should keep us guessing, a trickster to the end. She's a survivor; even her suicide is a survival tactic, and unlike Antony's, it's beautiful. It's also her final joke.

One thing this production lacks, though, is humour, a deficiency that especially weakens Cleopatra's scenes with her maids, of whom one is inadequate and the other weird.

Nor, though it's common practice, is there any reason to play the clown (Bernard Hopkins) of the last scene as a self-consciously winsome messenger of death. He doesn't have to be a barrel of laughs, but if he were innocently businesslike (You want asps? I got 'em) he would be more truly sinister.

Wayne Best as Enobarbus has his moments as a commentator, but he misses an astonishing amount of the role, including all of the wit and most of the soldiership. And when his anthology account of the queen in her barge had to be underlined with music to make its point, I felt like going home.

Antony calls Caesar "boy," an insult I have never seen taken so literally as it is here with Caesar played by Paul Dunn, an actor barely out of teenage roles. It startles at first, but imposes itself as it goes along; prematurely silver-haired (a Caesarean family trait, perhaps), Dunn conveys Octavius's hero-worship of Antony, and his concomitant resentment, and the increasing confidence of a born diplomat reinforced by the callousness of inexperience. His closing speech, though, is excessively perfunctory: Caesar may be in genuine awe of his dead adversaries, or he may be furious at being cheated of Cleopatra's presence at his triumph; either way he ought to feel something.

There are bits of business -- Pompey goes jogging, Cleopatra gets a massage, Enobarbus and Menas arm wrestle -- that seem merely fussy.

There is also a full contingent of messengers, running on and falling into exhausted heaps as if it were a rule of their (Eastern?) union.

The production is best when most direct. A set (by Allan Wilbee) that initially resembles a high-diving platform proves itself when it turns into Cleopatra's monument. Its invasion by the Romans, lethally confusing in most productions, is superbly staged here.

I've used the word "image" a couple of times; and it may, in its modern sense, be the theme of the play. Antony, Pompey, Enobarbus all perish when what they think of themselves, and what they want the world to think, lose contact with what is practically possible. Caesar survives because his ambitions, his values and his achievements are in exact alignment; Cleopatra has it both ways, the only protagonist in Shakespeare to die in satisfaction rather than in agony.

It may be the first play ever written about stardom -- and its fate (which may be poetic justice) has been to fall victim to its own legend. More of it than usual comes to life here.