Shakespeare Parts; Productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline's Reign, a Variation on the Original, Provide a Study in Editing Contrasts

Antony and cleopatra, Cymbeline’s Reign
the stratford festival, Shakespeare in the Ruff
the national post

There are cuts and there are cuts. There are also additions and substitutions. Two of Shakespeare's unruliest plays are currently on view in surgically altered or truncated versions. The omissions in Stratford's Antony and Cleopatra seem to be motivated mainly by the necessity of bringing the play in on time. In Withrow Park, Shakespeare in the Ruff offer us Cymbeline, which they've retitled Cymbeline's Reign: in itself an acknowledgment that what they're presenting is not the original piece but a variation on it.

The central design element at Stratford is a long, raised plinth, decorated with hieroglyphics; this means we're in Egypt. On this platform, Antony and Cleopatra embrace at the beginning of the play, and on this platform Cleopatra dies at the end of it. This gives Gary Griffin's production a shape, but what happens between is often amorphous. For the second time running, the play is being staged in the small Tom Patterson Theatre, possibly because it's feared that in the main Festival Theatre it might get swamped in spectacle. The alternative danger, given the play's multiplicity of short scenes (one of them only four lines long), is that action will be reduced to a series of exits and entrances, which is what happens here. Sometimes actors appear on a balcony, looking and sounding official; this means we're in Rome. That's a kind of clarity, but intellectually and emotionally the production is diffuse.

It's a marked contrast to this year's Patterson staging of King John (admittedly a more schematic play) in which everybody seems to be in the right place at the right time and which maintains a clear relationship between action and commentary. In Griffin's production that relation is obscured or neglected though it's emphasized, ironically enough, in the program-note that begins by quoting the famous opening speech in which a Roman soldier deplores his general's "dotage" just before we get to see and judge it for ourselves. Just as well the program does quote it, because the production eliminates it. But that speech sets up the whole convention of the play. We're offered a choice of world-views - the "all for love" of the title characters, the "all for politics" of Octavius Caesar - though Cleopatra in particular tries hard to get the best of both. No final moral judgment is provided, though moralists among the cast frequently offer their own. The principals are both public and private figures, so how others see them is as important as how they see themselves. The play's "big" scenes - the orgy on Pompey's galley, Antony's death, Caesar's reception of it - give us both perspectives at once; here they're reduced, physically and often textually. Considering what's been sacrificed, it's sometimes surprising what's been kept. Why retain the Ventidius scene, which serves a purpose but not a vital one? Why lose the important second half of a night-before-the-battle scene, leaving us uncertain whether the soldiers in what remains are Antony's or Caesar's?

Geraint Wyn Davies has the perfect look and bearing for Antony, a hero at the point of losing it, and much of his performance measures up: he gets the recklessness, the abandon, the authority, the self-torture, much of the passion. All he misses is the other passion, the sheer intensity of anger that can scare Cleopatra into faking her own death. Yanna McIntosh makes Cleopatra the consummate sexual manipulator, proud of her talents, furious when they fail her. She leaves unanswered the questions that bedevil this most opaque of characters. Does she, in any real sense, love Antony? (It's hard here to believe she does.) Does she really betray him? (And, if so, how could such a smart cookie expect to get away with it?) Ben Carlson begins by striking a fine balance between Caesar's calculation and his residual hero worship of Antony, though the latter slips too far away from him as the play progresses. Tom McCamus has to play Enobarbus, commentator-in-chief, speech by speech rather than as a whole, though his last despair is illuminated by the continuing presence onstage of Antony, whose generosity provoked it. I liked Sophia Walker's Charmian and Daniel Briere's Eros, Antoine Yared's Mardian, and Brian Tree's Clown, whom he doubles with an unconventionally grizzled Pompey the Younger; my favourite of all, though, is Stephen Russell's Soothsayer.

It's never struck me before, but Cymbeline is in some ways a sequel to Antony and Cleopatra; its political element concerns a tribute exacted from the ancient Britons by Octavius in his new guise as the Emperor Augustus. Brendan McMurtry-Howlett's seven-actor production gives the politics unusual prominence, courtesy of an "adaptation" by Andrew Joseph Richardson who has skilfully woven in some recognizable passages from other Shakespeare plays, plus some others that had me completely foxed. Richardson also proves himself an excellent actor, doubling a noble Roman Caius Lucius with a brilliant account of Cloten, the spoiled idiot prince. In this version, the lines addressed to him by a flattering Lord have been transferred to his flattering mother, which makes excellent dramatic and psychological sense, especially given Melee Hutton's ringing performance as the Queen. She's matched against Hume Baugh's Cymbeline, whom the adaptation (and the new title) work hard to portray as a tortured royal protagonist; the actor is more gainfully employed, though, as a hardbitten Roman officer, practically a new character. The clearest performance is given by Victor Dolhai as Pisanio, the most passionate by Jesse Griffiths as Posthumus, though the passion sometimes runs away with him, and the most outrageous by David Patrick Flemming whose ripe Italian accent as Iachimo is a lot of fun, but does obscure what he has to say. As Imogen, still the central role, Kaitlyn Riordan shouts too much to begin with, but settles down into being sweet and tough and touching. The sum total isn't exactly Shakespeare but it isn't a perversion either; the essentials are still there, the final scene being both funny and moving, as it has to be. Some major alterations to the plot result in the great funeral poem, "Fear no more the heart o' the sun" being cut in half and distributed among two separate scenes. It's still lovely.