Prospect and Retrospect

by Sheridan Morley 

      Prospect are back at the Old Vic, the theatre which must now beyond all shadow of doubt be considered theirs, and with them they’ve brought an Antony and Cleopatra which harks back to the Baylis tradition of readily acceptable and non-too-expensive Shakespeare for schools.  Not that this is to be considered a bad thing:  there’s a brisk no-nonsense efficiency about Toby Robertson’s bare-stage but lavishly costumed production which indicates its touring origins, and the casting is to say the least intriguing. 
      Alec McCowen, a born Octavius if ever I saw one, in fact plays Antony, converting that normally butch stud into an infinitely cynical, waspish, mocking General whose stature grows only in adversity:  early in the evening he seems inconvenienced rather than besotted by his Egyptian Queen, but there’s a masterly Act IV in which he handles both the departure of Enobarbus and his own failed suicide with a kind of crumbled nobility.  Playing opposite him Dorothy Tutin, as gorgeous and glorious an actress as you’re ever likely to come across, yet fails to be a great queen or even the Queen of the great country:  these two are locked into a curious modernity which makes them the commentators as well as the principal figures of the tragedy.
      Arch and mannered in their worst moments, in their best they are the odd couple:  funny, touching, domesticated even, but deeply unbelievable as the leaders of two great nations.  All though the evening one longs to see them do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  And yet, if you close your eyes, this is a marvelous production:  seldom can the verse speaking in Antony have been so intelligently thought out, never have I heard its music so clearly.
      Around the principals are grouped Derek Jacobi’s masterly Octavius (a performance not unlike McCowen’s own, though given in the correct persons) and Robert Eddison’s gallery of eccentric bystanders—two performances (as the soothsayer and the asp-bearer) which ought to gain him this year’s Max Adrian award for the actor most able to look like the Wizard of Oz.
      All in all it’s an oddly sexless production in which kingdoms are mocked rather than kissed away:  but there’s sturdy support from Bernice Stegers as an Octavia-incestuously in love with her brother, and from Kenneth Gilbert replacing Timothy West’s Enobarbus, and as an intelligent, unmajestic, chamber recital of the play Toby Robertson’s version has a lot going for it.

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