REVIEW F THE ARTS
Theatre
Two on the Nile
Kenneth Hurren
It would be going a good deal too far to say that the new production of Antony and Cleopatra, which joined the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory at Stratford-upon-Avon this week, should be seen and not heard; but it is, I think, its pictorial splendours that will linger in the mind, or in the mind's eye. The way in which Cleopatra's court is kitted out might well have excited the envy of the late Tutankhamun (even the platoon of flabby, shavenheaded eunuchs appear to have small fortunes in gold and lapis lazuli hung about their necks) and the backcloths and stagesetting properties, though minimal (a canopy here, a bed there, a few artistically scattered lounging cushions), are stunningly picturesque.
This is, of course, the third in the Stratford cycle of Shakespeare's four ' Roman ' plays being presented this season (joining Corio/anus and Julius Caesar, with Titus Andronicus to follow in October), and the production is clearly conceived — and can be clearly seen — within the context of that grand design. For the benefit of happy barbarians unfamiliar with the text, the director, Trevor Nunn, and his assistants have given a lot of thoughtful attention to clarifying the military and political activities of the day, which are usually there only as a background of confusing scenes, full of incomprehensible soldiers discussing incomprehensible wars, and except in a couple of places where Shakespeare himself was rather vague, the goings-on are wonderfully lucid. Unfortunately this admirable result is not achieved without cost. The background affairs, if no longer confusing, are often grindingly tedious and several of the actors involved in them are Singularly charmless and the chances are You'll feel pretty fretful about being so frequently and so lengthily, distracted from the relationship of the two central figures — which is, after all, where the important drama resides, in the desperate intensity of their personal tragedy rather than in the bold sweep of history, and it must reside there regardless of who plays them and how well they are played.
Cleopatra, as Shakespeare drew her, presents as knotty a casting problem as any In the canon. She is at once beautiful and regal, cruel and charming, witty and Jealous, in her speech both fastidious and bawdy, and, above all these things, triumphantly wanton. It is this last that has caused the defeat of some of the most distinguished English actresses of our time — most of them tending to regard the lady's fabulous promiscuity as a matter of an amiable social disposition rather than as an irresistible sexual compulsion — but one way and another things are loosening up a bit, and it did seem likely that Janet Suzman, the South African actress employed in the role by the RSC, would be
able to break through the barrier of innate gentility that has separated so many of our girls from the essence of the character. Miss Suzman does not quite make it. She seems to understand well enough that she is playing a woman for whose specific favours in bed a man threw away a third of an empire. She does not, nevertheless, suggest such a woman; not, anyway, to me. It may be that it is her inclination, sometimes, to hold herself as though nursing an armful of melons that I find disconcerting; but even at her most uninhibited, I'm afraid I thought of her less as an impassioned voluptuary than as just a darn good sport.
Richard Johnson, as her Antony, may have encouraged this impression. His role, too, is uncommonly taxing: a man a bit over the physical top, fallen in thrall to an
extraordinarily piquant mistress and given to weaving around the town with her at night, annoying the respectable citizenry, and provoking persistent ribald comment throughout the known world, but still, at fifty-three, a man of enormous stature, even grandeur. Johnson, it seems to me, is too much in decline, and he misses that residual greatness that might have carried them both to the heights of tragic passion.
I had a line back there critical of the supporting cast, but I'd like specifically to exempt the fine and sensitive Enobarbus of Patrick Stewart (who does splendidly with those ringing speeches about the queen's infinite variety and her burnished barge) and the lively, touching Charmian of Rosemary McHale. Their colleagues come in various hues (I should not be surprised to learn that our major subsidised companies had some sort of quota imposed on them unofficially by the Race Relations Board), but their performances, on the whole, are remarkably colourless.
The latest Shakespeare in London, on the other hand, is very colourful indeed, and dashingly, vigorous with it. You can tell a lot about a production from reading the programme acknowledgements, and you may feel that 'Carafe by Habitat,' 'Mad scene costume by Thea Porter' and 'Motorcycle by Yamaha Motorcycles' are all you want to know about the Hamlet on offer at the Bankside Globe Playhouse. In fact, Peter Coe's bizarre production — set in a fascist police state, where Claudius is a military dictator surrounded by stormtrooper henchmen — works more plausibly than most modern-dress versions. There are occasional anachronisms (the sword duel seems strikingly unlikely in such a gun-oriented society) and Hamlet's vacillating soliloquies scarcely accord with either the pervasive atmosphere of violence or Keith Michell's robust approach to the part. The play has to be taken as an amusingly melodramatic novelty, as a diversion for indulgent summer groundlings, and it seemed to me mercifully free from any loftier pretensions.
Quite possibly I am wrong in sensing such pretensions in Arnold Wesker's new piece, The Old Ones, at the Royal Court, but I'm afraid a writer who stuffs ghastly bits of ' literary ' dialogue into the mouths of otherwise decent and acutely observed characters — and even gives one poor girl a couple of brazen lectures, delivered to plainly unheeding oafs, about the uplifting virtues of reading good books — must come under that sort of suspicion. John Dexter directs the work with forbearing sympathy, and gets admirable performances from Max Wall, Rose Hill, Wanda Rotha, George Pravda and Patience Collier as elderly members of a Jewish family In the East End, but I could not take them to my heart as characters (for the reasons already given) and they are off-puttingly presented in a series of brief vignettes that seem entirely aimless until a late stage of the proceedings. Wesker is so earnest about the importance of his plays that I go along almost frantically eager to like them. The guilt, when instead I am merely bored and distressed and embarrassed, is awful.
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