CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"Antony and Cleopatra." By William Shakespeare. (Piccadilly) IT is impossible not to admire (among many other things) the objectivity with which Shakespeare presents Antony's dilemma. A theme to which a later playwright gave "The World Well Lost" as an alternative title must, one would have thought, encourage a certain tendency to partisanship. The romantic would imply that Antony's fall was so decisively broken by the bliss he shared with Cleopatra that the world was worth losing for such love ; the moralist would take an opposite view.
Shakespeare does neither. He ends up, by implication, on the moralist's side : not because he is a moralist, but because he is a man of the world. Antony broke the rules ; he conducted himself in a manner which is dangerous for any man, disastrous for a V.I.P. The very first line of the play—" Nay, but this dotage of our general's O'erflows the measure "—establishes the nature of his error (which was really one of scale), and throughout the rest of the play Antony's critics take him to task more for his solecisms than for his sins. His infatuation is presented, not as an immoral thing, but as an impractical thing—impractical for a man in his position. Shakespeare passes the world's verdict on the man who threw the world away.
The production of this tragedy at the Piccadilly Theatre is mag- nificent—a triumph of pace and colour and intelligence. "Revivals (of this play)," Sir Sidney Lee noted in the early years of this century, "have largely depended for their impressiveness on the sumptuousness of the scenic setting." Mr. Anthony Quayle's pro- duction is not sumptuous ; it is rich without ostentation. The inter-- dependence of a grand passion and the world's destinies is beauti- fully brought out ; conferences and campaigns are developments in, not interruptions of, Cleopatra's conquest of Antony and tne attion moves throughout at a terrific pace.
I do not see how Mr. Godfrey Tearle's Antony could be bettered. He looks, speaks and carries himself like a great captain, quick- tempered but not choleric, independent without being unreasonable, essentially generous and fair. He gives Antony a streak of that boyishness (for lack of a better word) which sometimes afflicts the great, and thus reconciles his intermittent realisation of his errors with his continuance in them. Mr. Tearle's performance of this part must surely be among the greatest that ,London has ever seen. • Dame Edith Evans plays Cleopatra with—on the intellectual level —great brilliance and is at her best when the- queen is in her lightet moods, concerned with scheming or raillery ; but at the cIrnax of the tragedy, though we cannot withhold our admiration of her playing, she does not move us as deeply as Mr.. Tearle does. Among the rest of the cast—throughout which the standard of the acting is very high—Mr. Quayle's Enobarbus stands out as a quiet, firm, accomplished performance of which the only possible criticism is that Enobarbus ought (surely?) to be in roughly the same Age and Service Group as Antony. Anyone who 'misses an opportunity of seeing this production is,
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