Free Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare Page B

Brook’s consciously unostentatious production found a simple solution to the problem of hauling a dying Antony up into the monument:
    This simplicity is clean counter to tradition. In the Redgrave-Ashcroft version at Stratford years ago, I remember a huge monument arising out of the ground like a mightily Miltonic exhalation: here a dark red cloth symbolises the monument and when Antony has to be hauled onto it Cleopatra and her attendants simply drag him across the floor with the aid of their belts. 57

    4. Antony is dragged across the floor, instead of heaved up to the monument: Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra and Alan Howard as Antony in Peter Brook’s 1978 stripped-down production.
    Patrick Stewart again played Enobarbus. This time he was “a man as besotted on Cleopatra as his master and one who enters into Egyptian hedonism with sheer sensual enjoyment.” 58
    Helen Mirren, directed by Adrian Noble (1982)
    Adrian Noble’s production boldly took a play associated with large-scale spectacle and rendered it on the bare floor of the minimalist studio theater, The Other Place. The stripped-down setting threw emphasis onto the skills of the actors, and Helen Mirren did not disappoint in the role of Cleopatra.
    Rather than relying on dripping jewelry, bobbed hair, and the other clichés of Oriental exoticism, Mirren rapidly established her complete authority by means of “lightning emotional reversals.” Her Cleopatra and Michael Gambon’s Antony pushed “the temperamental polarities” of the roles well beyond the usual limits, according to Irving Wardle in the London
Times
. He added, “In Gambon’s case this means a contrast between the public behaviour of a demi-god and a private life in which he regresses to the total sensuous dependence of infancy.” 59
    Nicholas Shrimpton, writing in the academic journal
Shakespeare Survey
, was puzzled by Bob Peck’s portrayal of Enobarbus: he “spoke ‘The barge she sat in’ in the outraged tones of a plain man who deeply disapproved of luxury.” Elsewhere, however, Shrimpton found “the fresh ideas were profoundly effective”: “Romans (and in particular Jonathan Hyde’s Octavius Caesar) were presented not as chilly technocrats but as emotional
mafiosi
, swarthy, violent, and sudden.” Shrimpton argued that the intimate space of The Other Place contributed to Mirren’s performance: “Only inches from her audience, in a crowded studio theater, she conducted a complex and tumultuous inner life with complete assurance.” He described the “remarkable depths” she gave to the final acts:
    In mourning for Antony she contrived an extraordinary ruin of her beauty—squatting on a grubby blanket, dressed in black with her hair scraped back and ash and dirt on her face. More astonishing even than this, however, was the subsequent transition to her suicide. As Caesar left, she suddenly passed(on “He words me, girls”) from an extremity of violent grief to a serene perception of her fate. 60
    Sorcha Cusack’s Charmian and Josette Simon’s Iras provided powerful support: the audience’s focus at the end was above all on a community of women, who were like sisters.
    Clare Higgins, directed by John Caird (1992)
    John Caird’s production was the first at Stratford for ten years and the first on the main stage for fifteen years. Richard Johnson recreated the role he had played with Janet Suzman twenty years before. He offered a world-weary Antony to Clare Higgins’s sensual Cleopatra. Reviewer Peter Holland found Johnson “quite simply too old and wearied,” adding:
    While a production might reasonably have wanted to explore an age-gap between the lovers, it cannot dispense with a sexual charisma around Antony. If Antony is not attractive, even in an elderly grizzled way, the production’s argument will tilt unbalanced and Johnson could do nothing to project a reasonfor Cleopatra’s fascination with him to match his obvious obsession with her. 61

    5. A disparity of