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A Truly Shakespearean Antony and Cleopatra: Anthony Hopkins and Judy Dench Bring Passion to Middle Age
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13221 |
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THE ARTS
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10 / 1987 |
1,165 Words |
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Herb Greer
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It is comforting to visit the past through a Shakespeare play. There are many ways of doing it. You can choose to let the poetry wash over you, surging through your emotions like the themes of some immense and thrilling symphony. Or you may prefer to marvel and clap at the director's flair for spectacle, and cluck at the neat slotting of the work into an intellectual-cum-political fashion of the day. This is the tenor of most "modern-dress" productions of Shakespeare, looking and sounding as often as not like the squash of a classical tune into Tin Pan Alley. If you are a commercial producer you might allow your leading actor to exploit Shakespeare in the hoary nineteenth-century manner, framing him with mediocrities and beginners, making it easy for him to wring wonder and applause (and money) from the audience with the virtuoso stuff of his own role. If it comes to it, almost any competent director and company can put up an acceptable show of some kind with Shakespeare, at worst aiming at the coarsest level of that coarse art to which so much theater tends - a conspiracy of on-and-offstage groundlings. But when the real thing appears, a Shakespeare play mature and fully realized, it is an event to make the belly seethe with excitement. That is what has happened this summer at London's National Theatre, with Peter Hall's production of Antony and Cleopatra.
The popular idea of this play is that of a spectacular love story, ending with two colorful suicides. But Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are not just a gaudy middle-aged couple playing Romeo and Juliet in the ancient world. They are political figures of great importance in a troubled period of Roman history: the post-Caesarian hiatus when power was shared in the empire between Octavius (Augustus) Caesar in the West and Mark Antony in the East, the two of them jockeying and then fighting for supreme authority. Antony, with a strong base in Egypt and a loyal Roman army of his own, represents a serious threat to Octavius.
Corrupting a Noble Roman
Cleopatra is more than a royal tart who corrupts a noble Roman, as it were draining his precious bodily fluids. She is a queen with imposing forces at her disposal, an ally who can make or break Antony's thrust for the empire. The destinies of this pair are bound together by love, certainly; but they depend on the huge political currents of the age. Their mutual infatuation, where it ought to sustain their alliance, ends by sapping their will and judgment. Octavius, with his youth, his necrotic temperament and superior cunning, is able to break Antony's challenge and hold the Roman Empire for himself. In defeat, Antony and Cleopatra first turn on each other, then embrace for their final fall into tragedy and death. This play is a seamless web of high politics and low passion, the one lending dignity and hieratic virtue to the other.
Halls' designer (Alison Chitty) sets the action inside the curve of a huge cracked Roman wall of mottled rust-color, pierced in the center by a broken portico which is bricked on one side, pillared on the other, and topped by a ruined architrave. The cracked sections of the wall move up and downstage to alter settings between Egypt and Rome. The costumes are Renaissance-cum-Roman in style, a rich burnt-red for Antony's Egypt and icy blue in the Rome of Octavius Caesar. Hall's direction is like the best incidental music: fluent, discreet, drawing the strands of the play into a cogent stream that appears to move quite spontaneously. The wit, the comedy, the epic emotion all stand
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