Octavius Caesar had virtually gained
control of the ancient world before the kickoff. On press night, Clive
Wood as Antony was still recovering from a virus that had made him miss
several previews, and James Hayes was laid up with an injury and unable
to play Lepidus. Even Cleopatra was sporting an ankle support.
Fortunately, Christopher Saul read in efficiently as Lepidus and Wood’s
performance seemed in no way attenuated by his recent illness. His
Antony is indomitable in manner, even if at every significant point he
loses in actual battle. Jonathan Munby’s production incorporates a
number of classical verse extracts in musical form, but it is largely
staged in standard Jacobean dress rather than togas and eastern
doodads, so Wood’s Antony looks and feels like a blunt Englishman
rather than a rarefied Roman.
Eve Best as Cleopatra is, unusually, still less exotic. The beautiful
queen’s mercurial moods and a personality that is at once
flibbertigibbet and manipulatrix render her compelling both to watch
and to play; Best adds to this a vigour which… well, one seldom thinks
of Cleopatra as a captain of netball, but it’s oddly plausible here. So
energetic is her changeability that Sirine Saba as Charmian seems as
much her PR flack as her waiting-woman, until the final acts bring a
calmer fatalism.
This strong central couple dominate proceedings even more than usual,
as a number of choices with second-tier characters fail to pay off.
Octavius is usually portrayed as callow but cold and above all a keen
strategist; here, Jolyon Coy is petulant throughout, quite deserving of
the thinly veiled contempt with which Antony treats him; he even pouts
resentfully at Cleopatra’s suicide. The casting of Phil Daniels as
Antony’s trusted lieutenant Enobarbus is, I think, intended to
emphasise the no-nonsense side of the character, but in practice
Daniels’ demotic delivery limits the more soaring moments such as his
early description of Cleopatra on her barge and his final defection and
falling upon his sword.
As usual, the need to play to a lively Globe audience means that the
most sombre tragedy sometimes goes by the board. Antony’s failure to
dispatch himself cleanly gets a laugh, but Wood admirably reclaims this
by laughing himself at the news that earlier word of Cleopatra’s death
was false. In effect, this
Antony
And Cleopatra is all, but all, about those two.
Written for the Financial
Times.