Abstract
Iqbal Khan’s rich, aesthetic and elegant production of Antony and Cleopatra was located in Antiquity: as masked Egyptian dancers and Romans in togas alternatively trod the stage, Egypt’s lush and Rome’s colourful music conjured up an expansive atmosphere, easing or enhancing transitions from West to East. The beautiful soundscape, created for the production by Laura Mvula, offered three themes (war, love, funeral) that were used throughout to emphasize dominant moods.
This Rome was visually very much the same Rome as in Julius Caesar (see Florence March’s review in this issue), both sets being designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, with a double row of square columns upstage, partially screened by red and gold drapery when the action moved to Egypt, flights of stairs and emblematic animals which identified each country: a sculpture of a horse being devoured by a victorious lion, an actual reproduction of a classical Roman monument, and, for Egypt, two tall, stylish statues of sitting black cats and a slender figure of Isis. The stage was equipped with a large central trap from which a platform rose, bearing Cleopatra’s bed, her funeral monument, onto which Antony was painfully hauled, and the pedestal on which Octavius was elevated to power after Cleopatra’s suicide. After the interval, heralding Antony’s defeat, the setting was altered and the columns were unequally ruined. This production also chose to show a splendid sea battle in Actium, thereby representing what is usually offstage: this gave rhythm and momentum to the play as model boats were shifted and pulled onstage by actors dressed as military men who performed a stylized fight to martial music. Once again music was part and parcel of the overall design.
‘Like the frantic lover’, the audience – and Antony (Antony Byrne) – saw ‘Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.10–11) thanks to a sensual, dangerously magnetic and enticing Cleopatra (Josette Simon), who was fully in control: in most of the scenes, she wore a golden lamé dress – except for a few private scenes where she was dressed in a pale-green gown. Her presence was overwhelming. She performed her role as queen, always conscious that she was under public scrutiny, that she needed to live up to her image, that her body was a ‘body politic’. Charmian (Amber James) and Iras’s (Kirstin Atherton) intimate relationship with Cleopatra in some scenes helped the audience to perceive the gap between her ‘two bodies’: their proximity to their mistress and the love she bore them humanized a queen obsessed by her royal status. In the playful opening scene or in private moments with her women, as when she mimed the act of love on Charmian’s back (1.5), or when she kissed Antony, alive then dead, the audience perceived how voluptuous she was; after Antony’s remarriage (2.5), she alternated between tears and dangerous anger, physically threatening the messenger, dominating him by her size and breaking her fishing rods (a visual joke on her angling abilities to catch men, mentioned in 2.5.10–15) as she tried to get at him. She switched from one emotion to the next with no transition, personifying a changing, unexpected Cleopatra. The line ‘Pity me but don’t speak to me!’ drew a laugh of relief after the turmoil of emotions, once again illustrating Simon’s capacity for self-distancing. As she was so focused on maintaining her emotions, on ruling them, she offered a mesmerizing show and was all the more touching when she allowed her ‘womanish’ grief at Antony’s death to surface.
The opening scene presented dancers, members of the Egyptian court, upfront, dressed in white, with dark, stylized cat masks: a bed rose from under the stage with Antony and Cleopatra frolicking on it while the messenger tried to deliver Octavius’ message: she playfully stole the letter and hid it between her breasts – Antony took it back between his teeth. He kissed and tickled her bare feet. Both seemed happy and carefree when Antony brutally dismissed the Roman messenger. They left the stage together: Antony, hidden under one of the long white gowns, carried a very tall, masked Cleopatra on his shoulders and they left in jest for the streets of Alexandria, conveying a sense of familiarity, of lovers’ playful push and pull. At the same time, Antony’s disguise in Cleopatra’s ‘tires and mantles’ seemed to confirm his Mars-like subjection to her Venus-like domination, even though in this case she ‘wore [not] his sword Philippan’ (2.5.22–3).
The lovers’ intense relationship was emphasized through music, when Cleopatra languidly pretended ‘to be sick and sullen’, reclining on her bed, and through costume changes, when Antony, back in his Roman armour, announced Fulvia’s death. During this first confrontation between the lovers, Cleopatra used all her seductiveness to humour him without yielding an inch of ground. They stood at either side of the stage, never sharing the same space. He finally picked up her scarf and made the first move towards her, tying it as a token of his love, while the chiming music of love underscored his bewitchment. As a queen, Cleopatra refused to let him see the extent to which she was affected by his departure; as a woman, she seemed to be protecting herself. This façade crumbled in the second part of the play, after the defeat at Actium. Wearing the same scarf as a veil, she made her way to a defeated Antony, centre stage, who crouched sobbing on the far side of the large gaping hole, in which one of the model galleys was in flames; she embraced him, using the scarf as a link. Metaphorically, her walking across the stage, skirting the void which resembled a volcano due to the smoke of the burning vessel, reflected both the general’s defeat as well as the lovers’ devastated relationship. Their prolonged kiss on the edge of this burning pit poignantly evoked the depth of their love as well as the collapse of their empire, fusing the fire of the battlefield and the fire of love: the closing of the gap while they embraced seemed to be due to the healing power of their love. The audience could feel their love, as they finally came together on the stage while on the brink of losing their power, their kingdoms and their lives.
Cleopatra staged her suicide with a deeply ironical sense of mise en scène. As she removed her wig, revealing a closely shaved head, and stripped, she briefly revealed the private body of Antony’s Egyptian wife. She then dressed in all her regal accoutrements, armouring herself as ‘Egypt’ and elevating her royal persona as a public monument to her own memory, thereby heroically erasing her private self from the sight of the crowd and sealing her love for Antony in her words and within herself. The final tableau showed young Octavius taking a lesson of political empowerment as he contemplated the enthroned dead queen sinking under the stage (where Antony had previously disappeared) while he rose on a pedestal.
Another interesting choice in this production was the picturing of a strong Octavius (Ben Allen). The first appearance of the Romans, oddly reminiscent of Paco Rabanne’s current ad for the fragrance Invictus, presented an impressive, muscular Octavius, half-naked, wrapped in a white linen toga, discussing politics and Antony’s merits with Lepidus and three half-naked men, in Roman steam baths; this, as well as the music, suggested a more sensual Rome, where politicians do not always spend their time in the Senate.
Octavius’ anger at Antony immediately conveyed a feeling of complex antagonism between the two men, the young and fit Caesar and the older general, broad-shouldered and stout, and this was evident from the start: in Rome, when Octavius asked Antony to sit, he did so, and Octavius’ reaction, both self-satisfied and somewhat baffled, underlined Antony’s political sense of compromise. Caesar was also made more humane thanks to his relationship with his sister. Octavia (Lucy Phelps) was fully fleshed out. This production expanded Shakespeare’s somewhat shallow character with historical elements: as an articulate woman with a privileged relationship with her brother, whom she fondly hugged onstage, she fully grasped the political nature of her alliance with Antony, as suggested by Agrippa, and yet they seemed well matched, so much so that when he left her for Egypt, she appeared pregnant on stage – a historical element added to the script. Their silent marriage scene, also added, was very graphic, effectively underscored by music: Octavia, who was elegantly dressed in bright turquoise, provided once again a positive image of Roman society, qualifying the caricature of a dark, bleak and loveless Rome. Moreover, the easy affection between Antony and a younger Octavia, shedding another light on the bewitched general, contrasted sharply with the complex relationship between a more mature Antony and Cleopatra – yet this only seemed to enhance Cleopatra’s seasoned superiority.
The cast was drastically reduced for clarity’s sake (23 characters on stage versus over 40 in Shakespeare): in Act 5 Scene 2, it was Agrippa (James Corrigan), and not Dolabella, who warned Cleopatra about Octavius’ intentions, suggesting that he too was attracted by the Egyptian queen. Overall, the supporting cast was given important roles to create a coherent, well-balanced production. Many moments were treated as inset scenes, allowing secondary relationships to develop yet always pointing back to Cleopatra’s overwhelming power over the other characters. Although undeniably dominated by a mesmerizing Cleopatra, this production used music and a full cast to create the world in which she and Antony could no longer live together.