This was the Hampstead Players’ summer choice this year. The first thing that strikes you about this great play is that it does exactly what it says on the tin. It is literally a play about Antony and Cleopatra. Octavius Caesar is an important figure from the point of view of the plot, but it is their story. And it is a play about grown-ups for grown-ups. Though it is a love story, it is a story of power – political, military and sexual, and it tells it like it is.
Here are no sweet young lovers like Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra have been there and done that, as is constantly pointed out to us in the text. I suppose the other main female Shakespeare character in a tragedy who is so concerned with power would be Lady Macbeth, but she schemes, bullies and plots behind the scenes as it were. She wants power, and her and Macbeth’s tragedy is what happens when they get it. How different is Cleopatra! Power? She’s centre-stage; she’s had it all her life; she is Egypt. What a challenge for a boy actor the past must have been!
And then we have Antony, the charismatic general with the dubious political past, who has absolute feet of clay when it comes to women. From the very opening lines, his supporters are worried he has lost his magic, and he knows himself he’s hung around in Egypt far too long. The Serpent of the Nile can coil rings around him and he even plunges into marriage with Octavia because it might be a good political move, after his poor neglected wife dies in Rome. This, not unnaturally, causes an outbreak of vicious jealousy in Cleopatra.
There is something very operatic about this play. What arias! What duets! What Monteverdi, who chose to tell the story of Nero and Poppea, or Handel, who wrote some of his most brilliant and beautiful music for the story of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, would have made of this one! And how the great Venetian painters, particularly Tiepolo, loved to paint such scenes as the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony in full armour bowing over her hand; or the banquet [of course in a Venetian palace] where she is disdainfully about to dissolve a pearl earring in a goblet of vinegar, and drink it, to show how rich she is. [Your present reviewer shudders at the thought!]
But the play’s the thing.
It is always interesting when someone finds the role for them. And so it was with Gaynor Bassey’s Cleopatra. From her first entrance, so enhanced by the music which was most effective throughout the play, she exuded sultry glamour, even down to her serpent armlet. She developed the character from playful sex kitten to a tigress in her rage at Antony’s marriage, to royal dignity when facing being Caesar’s captive, and her animal howl of anguish on realizing Antony is dead was very moving. And Gaynor really projects – you can always hear her.
Bill Risebero, who directed as well as playing Enobarbus of which more later, had devised a very beautiful mourning group, like some French or Italian 19th century sculpture, with Cleopatra and her ladies over the body of Antony, while at the other side of the stage Caesar was reacting to Antony’s death.
David Gardner as Antony very much conveyed that even when he didn’t want to think about her, or shouldn’t, Cleopatra is always on his mind, so that you cannot help thinking how weak, even if understandably, he is when he keeps on saying he ought to be there, and when he is so defensive in front of Caesar on his return to Rome. When he marries Octavia, played with gracious elegance by Patrice Dorling, every line comes across as sheer hypocrisy. How well he did the lines when planning that simply marvellous party [and their last] when he goes back to Cleopatra. When, finally, he knows he’s lost it, he works himself back into heroic dignity by his rage at his own mistakes. His scene with Jon Siddall’s Eros was touching and effective.
Adam Sutcliffe, as Octavius Caesar, the other main character in the story, had a fine line in scalding sarcasm – and some of the time, at least, you cannot help seeing his point. His magnificent boots almost had a role of their own, particularly as they suggested many more recent authoritarian regimes. Whether he really was as fond of his sister as he claimed to be was carefully left open.
Cleopatra’s ladies, played by Jade Davidson, Hoda Ali and Rose Abderabbani, looked delightful in their simple cream satin gowns, and came across as very sympathetic. It cannot have been easy to cope with Cleopatra’s mood swings, but they did it very gracefully.
Bill Risebero, as Enobarbus, has one of Shakespeare’s great poetic speeches: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne” ranks with “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces” of The Tempest, the “bank where the wild thyme blows” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or “the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patens of bright gold” of The Merchant of Venice. Bill started off quite simply, just telling Simon Malpas’ level headed Agrippa [somebody needed to be!] about a special day. As he got swept up in his description and his admiration for what he had seen, he was on his feet, building up the cadences of the speech, which worked splendidly. The transition from being a bit of the sort of good-time guy there must be in every occupying army, to the man haunted by his turn-coat behaviour, was very effective.
The almost cameo role which really must be mentioned is John Dansey’s Demetrius, the unfortunate messenger who has to tell Cleopatra that Antony has married Octavia. He was scared stiff, and quite right too. Cleopatra, in that scene, would scare anyone. And a welcome comic edge added to the structure of the scene. Messengers do not do well in this play! We had poor Stephen Clarke, as Philo, beaten with rods – offstage but with gruesome yells, and Stephen Tucker’s Euphronius finding it hard to get out the words when confronting Caesar.
The scarlet lighting for the offstage battle scenes, the contrast of the Romans’ dark European costumes with Antony and his men almost ‘gone native’ in Egypt, the fanfares for battles, and the simple block-set painted in the Egyptian style, all added to the performance.
And of course there were the other characters who appear and disappear in the story, all well played – soothsayer, soldier, scary clown with the asp, politicians.
And, at the end, we may quote Shakespeare back to him and say “Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety.”
Antony and Cleopatra – Review
Suzanne Pinkerton