First and last loves
Patrick Carnegy Antony and Cleopatra Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Romeo and Juliet Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind generalisation, it’s time to get down to specifics in two of the resident company’s early contributions to the festival.
In the Swan there’s a starrily cast Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory Doran, while in the main theatre Nancy Meckler takes on Romeo and Juliet. Doran gives us pretty much heritage Shakespeare, with Meckler updating the battleground of the Montagues and Capulets to an ugly city square that feels more like Sicily than Verona. You don’t have to choose between such different approaches, for Shakespeare offers an infinity of performing possibilities, but you do need to ask just how good each is in its own way.
Doran is a safe pair of hands. No one knows better than he how to use the thrust stage of the Swan. He makes sure the dying Antony is lifted up with ropes to join Cleopatra in her ‘monument’ high above the stage as Shakespeare wanted. Just as you’re wondering how on earth Cleopatra will manage her own death on the bare stage, a gilded throne and flickering braziers are suddenly sprung from its bowels. Seated on a gangway near the stage, you can smell the real leather of the Romans’ armour as they rush on and off, though not quite catch the perfumed aura of the Egyptian queen.
She is Harriet Walter, with Patrick Stewart making a hugely welcome return to Stratford as her Antony. On paper it looks like dream casting, and in the case of Stewart it actually is. Way back in the golden founding era of the RSC I recall him as a memorable Enobarbus. As Antony he seems scarcely to have aged and is indeed rejuvenated in having regained a becoming fuzz of hair from which his years in Star Trek had too long separated him. He exudes that winning blend of power and charm which would persuade soldiers to follow him to the ends of the earth and capture any heart he chose. ‘Gusto, comical and yet godlike,’ writes Harold Bloom, ‘is the essence of Antony.’ Stewart has it in spades, showing you every nuance of Antony’s greatness, infatuation and fatal loss of judgment.
This last is not just in matters military, but here palpably extends to his sacrificing so much to a Cleopatra of so scant a sexuality as Harriet Walter. ‘Our dungy earth alike,’ observes Antony, ‘feeds beast as well as man,’ but evidently not this Cleopatra. Walter gives us a creature of the purest English air, doubtless exquisitely at home in her golden barge (as so famously described by Enobarbus) but impossible to imagine wielding the whip over which Antony chuckles as his love-trophy at his first entrance. Certainly, she manages the sudden changes of mood and verbal tone with consummate ease. But she’s too much the capricious weekend hostess from the shires to be any match for Stewart’s robustly captivating Antony. He’s supported with strong performances from John Hopkins as Caesar and Ken Bones as Enobarbus.
In the big theatre, Nancy Meckler goes for an aggressively modern Romeo and Juliet. There’s a square playing area with an ugly overhead gantry from which illuminations and a garish star can be hung for the Capulets’ party, and later the jackets of the various victims of the feuding. At the back of the stage an immense framed picture screen registers blue skies or stormy weather as appropriate. The one truly original touch is that the guns touted by the opposing factions at the beginning are, in a ritualised amnesty, exchanged for staves. The violence is stylised into stick fights with a great clatter of stamping and manic tapdances of death that seem more Spanish than Italian. Equal to all this furioso local colour is Morven Christie’s delightfully sparky Juliet, laughing after Romeo’s first kiss and playfully slapping him for being such a naughty boy. For the balcony scene there’s much scrambling up and down a climbing frame that’s graced at the top with sprigs of greenery. Juliet’s tough scenes with her parents (Nicholas Day, excellent as Capulet) are put across far more convincingly than those with Rupert Evans’s exceedingly ordinary Romeo.
What’s wrong with all this ‘modernity’ is not the fact of it in itself, but that it’s handled in such a muddled way. Continental directors tend to be pilloried by English critics for their ‘concept’ productions. But a clear concept, such as the Münchner Kammerspiele brought to their Othello, was precisely what was missing. Even more serious was Meckler’s failure, particularly in the first half, to help the actors get the show across to every seat in the house. Opening up the stage to its distant rear wall made it very hard for the young cast to project their words. As the Americans in the seats behind me remarked, ‘Everything you know about Shakespeare is very talky.’ And by this they were actually registering, all too politely, the fatal verdict that they simply weren’t getting the half of it.
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