Theatre
Antony and Cleopatra (National)
Amadeus (Old Vic)
Jackie (Queens)
Back to zero
Sheridan Morley
Given how much is wrong with the National's new Antony and Cleopatra, it might be as well to start with what is right, and that is essentially the casting of Helen Mirren. Having played Cleopatra three times in a 30-year career, she is now in total charge of the role, and exudes a confidence and control of the ever-changing moods of the play which is elsewhere sadly lacking. True, Sean Mathias's gimmicky production is not exactly helped by Tim Hatley's sets, which incarcerate the Romans in a kind of grubby Perspex greenhouse, while allowing Cleopatra herself to die in what looks like a cut-price candle warehouse.
We also get, somewhere in Act III, a repeat of the weird line-dancing with which Mathias also opened his A Little Night Music on this stage a couple of years ago, not to mention an Enobarbus who, so far from the usual grizzled warrior, seems to have wandered in from a gay bar some- where in downtown Alexandria. We also, on the first night, were treated to the unhappy spectacle of a large cast having to bend double in order to enter or escape one particular set which had clearly failed to rise to sufficient height, as well as an Antony from Alan Rickman so patently exhausted and dispirited, presumably from rehearsals, that his defeat at the hands of the Romans and Cleopatra herself, when it did come some three hours later, also came as no surprise. Whether Alan Bates, the original casting here, would have survived the sets and the Production any better is debatable; what is Clear is that Mathias has so little faith in the play or the poetry that he is finally reduced to sprinkling fairy dust on his play- ers, thereby all too aptly summarising what has already gone so wrong. Given that the National is now run by one of the best of "11 Shakespearean directors, Trevor Nunn, it seems amazing that this production was ever allowed to open on its main stage; but then again, all tickets for a brief run were Sold out in advance on the strength of Mir- ren's television fame, so presumably the thinking was that they had nothing to lose. The trouble is that, having established with a recent Othello and King Lear that the National could indeed overtake the RSC at its own game, this production has put them back to zero.
And now a modest proposal: with the National apparently determined on a winter of tried and tested commercial winners (Oklahoma!, Jean Brodie, Peter Pan and Betrayal) and the RSC seemingly unable to decide whether it is still meant to be a per- manent company or a home for short-run starry hits that can rapidly move into the West End, we are faced with the unhappy prospect of the best classical company of the decade being forced to close. In order to run next year at the Old Vic, the Peter Hall Company needs a mere half-million pounds which the remnants of the Arts Council has shamefully refused to find. In my view, this money should now be levied as a fine on the National and the RSC, and handed over to Hall; a mere quarter-million from each is not likely to carve much of a hole in their sizeable grants, and it might also serve to sharpen up their thinking as to precisely what they are there for, especially as both national companies owe their foun- dations very largely to Sir Peter himself.
In what may well otherwise be his swan song at the Vic, Hall is reviving Peter Shaf- fer's Amadeus, the play he first established almost 20 years ago on both sides of the Atlantic. It may well be that nothing will ever improve on the original Paul Scofield/ Felicity Kendal/Simon Callow casting, but Shaffer's account of the battle between Mozart and Salieri is a modern classic, and holding up very well indeed, especially as the playwright has continued over two decades, countless stage revivals and a movie to strengthen and tighten some of Salieri's battles with God. It is clearly now that heavenly relation- ship, rather than Salieri's earthly battle with Mozart, which Amadeus is all about, even though two-man conflicts between the divine genius and the earthly plodder are at the heart of nearly all Shaffer's writing. Michael Sheen brings considerable new energy to the child-prodigy Mozart Call smugness and seduction') but this remains David Suchet's evening, as his wonderfully irritable Salieri (`Opera used to be about the raising of the Gods; now it's all Rossini and the escapades of hairdressers') rails against his own mediocrity. Charles Kay is again in wonderful form as the sublimely dismissive Emperor Joseph, the one who reckons that Mozart writes too many notes.
While it cannot be long now before the first Princess Diana musical, the gala bad taste of Jackie is not its central problem, nor yet is it as consistently unfunny as most of my critical colleagues would have you believe. The title character is of course the late Mrs Kennedy Onassis, as played by Lysette Anthony who spends much of the evening looking and sounding rather more like Grace Kelly. Around her, ten actors play about a hundred characters in light- ning sketches from her apocryphal life, and Gip Hoppe as writer and director has built around them the kind of dinner-theatre cabaret that has worked wonderfully in New York for 20 years or more as Forbid- den Broadway, but somehow has always proved alien to British tastes.
Nevertheless, the Kennedy/Nixon televi- sion confrontation and the idea of Jackie's Greek marriage as a parody of Medea work wonderfully in an otherwise very patchy evening; some shows, even some genres, still fail to make the Atlantic crossing, and I fear Jackie may have trouble repeating her New York success. Then again, there are those who would argue that she always did.
`Still, it beats nothingness.'
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