OK, this is something I haven’t gotten to in a while. I have no real excuse. I get wrapped up in other activities, and these teleplays tend to run somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours or so. That takes time. But I did just finish teaching this play to my current batch of students, and I really do want to finish this project. So, here we are. Antony and Cleopatra. A potential sequel to a play Shakespeare had written six years before, but there’s a possibility he held off on writing this one until after Queen Elizabeth died in case she took it wrong. That would have been a very distinct possibility.
I know I usually start these with the best I can do for a personal anecdote, but this one, though one of the last great tragedies Shakespeare wrote, is one I remember best for the one time I saw a live performance of it. Said performance was in New York by a group called the Queen’s Men, an all-female troupe that did an admirable job, imaging Antony and the Romans in some sort of modern military style with Cleopatra and the Egyptians done in what the program claimed was a Bollywood influence. I saved the program for a while, but then I took it to work one day, left it in my classroom, and returned to find someone had drawn facial and armpit hair onto the two women playing the lead roles on the cover. How mature…
Notable cast members: There really weren’t any particularly recognizable actors in this one. Antony is played by Colin Blakely, and he had a nice career, possibly best remembered by me as Dr. Watson in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Octavius Caesar was played by Ian Charleson, one of the lead actors from Chariots of Fire, and that came out the same year as this production. If anything, the biggest observation I would make about the cast is they did not use actors who had played the same role in the BBC’s earlier production of Julius Caesar.
Trivia: Cleopatra actress Jane Lapotaire was actually deathly afraid of snakes (and probably still is since she is still alive as far as I know), and Cleopatra actually needs to handle one. She is a professional, though, and did her job.
On another note, this is one of two of these plays the BBC made to add supplemental material from an author other than Shakespeare. In this case, the description for the Battle of Actium came from the writings of Plutarch, who was likely Shakespeare’s own source.
The play: Shakespeare wrote a lot of lovers over his career, but most of them were youthful types full of energy and jealousies that fell instantly for each other and got married within a week provided the play in question is a comedy. I’ve heard it said the only mature married couple in Shakespeare’s works are the Macbeths (there’s a cheerful thought), but Antony and Cleopatra are both rather unique in that they’re both middle aged. The real Cleopatra was 39 years old when she and Marc Antony started their affair, and he was in his 50s. What makes Antony and Cleopatra such magnificent characters is that the pair have their own needs and goals as the leaders of their respective territories. My students this week have spoken quite a bit of how manipulative Cleopatra is, overlooking how much Antony does similar things to her. In my mind, that isn’t right as it takes Octavius Caesar off the hook–he breaks the treaty with Pompey and locks up the third member of the Triumverate, Lepidus, first–and it does seem as if Caesar may have just been looking for an excuse to attack Antony anyway.
That might have been a mutual feeling except Antony, who speaks and is spoken of many times over as to whether or not he is “being Antony,” would rather not do much of anything but spend time with his Egyptian queen. Of the two, he is the weaker. As the play winds down, it becomes clear that Antony can’t do much of anything right. His people dessert him, he loses most of the battles, the one he does win he does so by first going through men who defected from his side to Caesar’s, and when he finally opts to kill himself, he can’t even pull that off without lingering painfully for quite some time. Blakely’s take on the character shows the man having what looks like an extended nervous breakdown as he falls deeper and deeper into despair as he loses everything. And yet, he is still a nobler and more attractive ruler than Caesar, a callous and callow young man who is mostly stern and unforgiving.
But then there’s Cleopatra, a jewel of a role for an older, more experienced actress. Lapotaire certainly has the acting chops, going from playful to sorrowful to determined as needed, and she is not a young ingenue. She’s clearly an older actress playing an older woman, so the attraction that Cleopatra manages to weave over so many of the men in the play (Caesar being the only really prominent man who seems to be immune to her charms) has to come from her vivaciousness, charm, and personality. Cleopatra actually has more control over her destiny than either Antony or Caesar would assume, and she manages to maintain control over her own destiny despite Antony’s rages and Caesar’s planned humiliations.
Interesting to note, while the BBC’s Julius Caesar was done in a style to suggest ancient Rome with togas and the like on the cast, Antony and Cleopatra is more theatrical in its staging and costumes. Shakespeare’s cast would have worn costumes contemporary to themselves and not to the ancient Romans. This production used costumes that look like a mix of both Elizabethan/Jacobean English and ancient Roman/Egyptian, giving the play a unique aesthetic.
Grade: There’s a lot of power to this one, especially in the last act when Cleopatra absolutely demonstrates why she is one of is not the best female part Shakespeare ever wrote, and the central pair here are strong in both of the title roles. For this one, I’m going with an A-.
Next: There may not have been a lot of famous faces in Antony and Cleopatra, but that is most assuredly not the case with the next one, one that happens to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies: Othello.
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