Edinburgh Theatre
by J W Lambert
Along with its “Hamlet,” the Prospect Theatre Company’s production
of “Antony and Cleopatra: and Dryden’s “All For Love” privily packed the
Old Vic for some weeks earlier this summer, even without being reviewed.
No wonder. Their official
openings in the Assembly Hall at the Edinburgh Festival revealed both
productions as immensely satisfying as well as, if you care, a stimulating essay
in the history of ideas.
Antony and Cleopatra is directed by Toby Robertson.
His casting at once indicated a fresh approach.
Dorothy Tutin was not going to give us some languorous, fly-blown,
fleshly charmer. Hers is a trim
termagant, her passion in the end (and in Shakespeare’s text) second to her
political judgment. Radiant in joy
or rage, she keeps a sharp eye on herself in every maddening, enchanting mood,
and rightly makes it clear that she dies not for love of Antony but in contempt
of humiliation by Octavius.
So more was Alec McCowen going to give us a teased-out super playboy.
Brisk and bearded, quivering like a gundog, he shows us a great man torn
apart, in turn weary, exuberant, bitterly wounded and gravely tired in
resignation.
Derek Jacobi’s Octavius is not one of those familiar psychopath Caesars
with no lips and whiplash voice. Though
he can cast a chill with the lift of an eyebrow, this is a Caesar whose belated
tribute to Antony for once does not ring false.
And was there ever a finer Enobarbus than Timothy West’s battered old
campaigner, all watchful experience and self-contempt beneath the clubman’s
cynicism?
The tone of Cleopatra’s court is set by Charmain and Iras seen as
bedizened middle-aged bitches; and by the pearled and gilded, plumed, heraldic
decadence of Georgiadis’s Elizabethan costumes (almost as sumptuous, perhaps,
as those in Shakespeare’s company). A
warm light for Egypt, a cold light for Rome; that Leviathan presence behind all
the action.
Shakespeare’s play could never have been subtitled, as
All For
Love is, “The World Well Lost,”
By the time Dryden came to treat this popular dramatic subject a great
change of sensibility was already going strong.
And though his models were classical and French, his treatment, in clear,
easy blank verse, was romantic and very English; not least in its humour, always
edging towards the comedy of manners.
And so Georgiadis’s no less gorgeous costumes shift, for Frank
Hauser’s most acutely paced and phrased production, into a Handelian world of
peri-wigs and blazing sculptured cloaks, against an austere paneled background
in the reconstructed Assembly Hall auditorium, its stage much improved as a
cockpit rather than a promontory.
Dryden’s Cleopatra is no politician, and despite appearances utterly
faithful. Barbara Jefford plays her
with incandescent power—well complemented, when the bitter confrontation
comes, by the pale disdain of Suzanne Bertish as Octavia (a much more
interesting lady than Shakespeare’s).
But the play is really a series of mirrors held up to an Antony in whom
sexual subjection is at war not so much with intelligence as with self-respect.
John Turner explodes with physical and vocal grandeur into a figure of
pitiful towering helplessness, especially fine in the corrosive bath of jealousy
which all but consumes him.
Both Cleopatra and Antony are cleverly counterpointed:
he by the crisp Ventidius of Kenneth Gilbert, a sardonic executive
officer, an inverted Iago, always ready with unflattering loyalty; she by a
superbly insinuating portrait by Robert Eddison, master of the murderous
half-smile, as Alexas, the meddling eunuch, all gloating unhappy malice.