Free Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

overcame elements of “campiness” in the final act:
    When he appeared in a simple shift with a rattily shorn head, the audience gasped at his vulnerable appearance. Without the frippery, he seemed neither a man nor a woman but simply a human being ravaged by pain. In her death, utterly still and clothed in gold, as memorable a moment as her silly ones, Rylance’s Cleopatra became for the first time in the production a truly regal queen. Cued by Rylance’s performance, this all-male production winked at, and then embraced its audience. 45
    The play continues to challenge actors, directors, and audiences with radical and experimental productions which explore the play’scomplex mixture of politics, passion, and play-acting. Cinema would seem the perfect solution to many of the play’s staging problems, but the only cinema film of Shakespeare’s play is an idiosyncratic 1972 version directed by Charlton Heston in which he plays Antony himself, with a miscast Hildegarde Neil as Cleopatra. There is a lot of water in it, including a full-scale Battle of Actium. Jonathan Miller’s 1981 production for the BBC television Shakespeare, with Jane Lapotaire and Colin Blakely, was again inspired by pictorial images from the Renaissance. The most successful filmed version is Jon Scoffield’s adaptation of Trevor Nunn’s 1972 RSC production with Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson:
    This is a self-consciously filmed production rather than an attempt to translate the play via the conventions of television realism. As such it cleverly foregrounds notions of perspective, as we wonder whose version of events we are watching. Suzman gives a look to camera in an early sequence that suggests that ultimately it is hers, and her dignified self-control in death certainly supports this impression. 46
AT THE RSC: SEVEN CLEOPATRAS AND THEIR ANTONYS
    What the real Cleopatra was like we will never know. She certainly wasn’t the libertine of the Roman imagination (she was probably celibate for the majority of her adult life). (RSC program note, comparing Cleopatra to the goddess Isis, for Steven Pimlott’s 1999 production)
    The great sluts of world drama, from Clytemnestra to Anna Christie, have always puzzled our girls; and an English Cleopatra is a contradiction in terms. (Kenneth Tynan, reviewing Peggy Ashcroft’s Cleopatra,
Evening Standard
, 1 May 1953)
    Almost without exception, the starting point for a director of
Antony and Cleopatra
is the casting of the female lead. The following account of seven RSC productions accordingly begins from their Cleopatras.
    Janet Suzman, directed by Trevor Nunn (1972)
    Janet Suzman is widely regarded as one of the greatest Cleopatras of modern times. Her triumph in Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production was in part due to her success in separating the monarch from the myth, the Shakespearean text from the clichéd image. Suzman’s Cleopatra was “only incidentally a voluptuary.” Her most powerful weapon was her language, which ran the gamut from lyricism to capriciousness. The reviewer for the London
Times
could hardly contain himself: “she presents Cleopatra’s caprice with immense relish and wit: and last night, as her eyes glazed in a moment that communicated the sudden stopping of her pulse, I was held in something like awe.” 47

    3. Janet Suzman as Cleopatra attended by her women and eunuchs in Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production.
    Antony and Cleopatra
was the third play to appear in the 1972 season’s cycle of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, exploring the politics of Rome, “the birth, achievement and collapse of a civilisation.” 48 The critic Peter Thomson suggested that the plays presented “four different historical crises,” with Rome growing from “small tribe to City-state (
Coriolanus
), to Republic (
Julius Caesar
), to Empire (
Antony and Cleopatra
), and to a decadence that is the prelude to Gothic conquest (
Titus Andronicus
).” 49 The King Tutankhamen exhibition, which opened in March