Star-Crossed Lovers Need a Little More Amore

antony and cleopatra
Shakespeare in the rough
the national post

Some plays defeat the best of intentions. I was set to be impressed by Ruth Madoc-Jones' production of Antony and Cleopatra, just on the basis of its line-by-line lucidity. It's one of those Shakespeare productions in which the actors seem to know both what they're talking about and who they're talking to. More than that, there's an engaging feeling of gossipy intimacy about the early scenes here, the ones devoted less to Antony and Cleopatra themselves than to their entourages. But gossip alone won't get you through this play. It also needs grandeur.

I don't mean scenic grandeur, or even numerical. The standard editions credit the play with 34 named characters and 42 separate scenes, but the text can be (and here has been) intelligently cut, and the minor people sensibly combined or doubled. Nor do the extremely casual conditions of Withrow Park -- a space rather than a stage -- do the play any harm. As usual at Shakespeare in the Rough, the wide, deep spaces stretching beyond the main playing area provide evocative pictures. Some of them are sketchy, but it's helpful to be reminded of Rome when we're in Egypt and of Egypt when we're in Rome.

But none of this matters very much without stars -- not star names, necessarily, but star presences. Antony and Cleopatra is a play about stardom -- maybe the first ever. Its two protagonists have the free-spending habits of stardom; Antony, who gives kingdoms as presents and finally throws away an empire, is insanely generous, materially and emotionally, and Cleopatra, far more canny and cautious in what she gives away, finally learns generosity from him. If that largesse isn't there in them, we have no reason to care; and the play becomes an elaborate chronicle, pointlessly spun out. That is what happens here.

One lead performance is stodgy, the other unformed. Sean Dixon's Antony is sometimes good at anger, but the passion that eventually terrifies Cleopatra, leading her to fake her own death and so provoke his, is nowhere to be found. Lesley Dowey's Cleopatra isn't frightening enough either; the messenger who brings her the news of Antony's marriage ought to be lucky to escape with his life, but here he seems in no danger whatever. This Cleopatra can be flirtatious, but she isn't technically up to all those words, especially the awesome flood of them in her last scene. It's a promising performance, but in this context an insufficient one.

Some supporting players do well, most of them in omnibus roles that gather several characters under a single umbrella. Thus, Richard Lee gives an incisive account of several Egyptian functionaries, all called Alexas, while Brett Christopher does as much for a bunch of Roman officers answering to the name of Agrippa. Christopher Morris is excellent as Enobarbus, the Roman soldier half- seduced by the pleasures of the East, although when he gets into deeper waters -- tormenting himself for deserting his master, Antony -- he merely treads them; but by this point the whole production seems to have lost its grip. The passions at stake are simply too much for it. So are the politics. Gregory Prest has almost no handle on the ultra-cool Octavius Caesar, but then he's let down from his very first entrance, when the director has him chasing after his ineffectual colleague Lepidus rather than the other way around. Maybe I was being too generous about this production's intelligence. It's also plagued, as shows at this address often are, by a theme song, something about eternal love; the words are by Ezra Pound, but it's still banal. It's sung, like an Andrew Lloyd Webber theme, at the beginning of the play, at the half-way point, and at the end. Can't they tell how demeaning that is?