Antony & Cleopatra

Stars are for the seller. Very dull mis-cast performance by some incredibly good actors.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the plays in English about Cleopatra. Shakespeare's play is marginally closer to history than the others...and it also has that wonderful blank verse. This is an excellent production with creative and very effective staging.

Timely delivery, and product as described.

About forty years ago I was participating in a performing comedy group in college. I recall working on one “skit” that was to lampoon censorship of anything that contained a hint of sexual content. I explored using a famous scene from a Shakespeare tragedy, in this case the dialog between Cassius and Brutus from Julius Caesar, and replacing non-sexual words and ideas with the censors “beep.” The end result was the reverse of what a censor was intending, the beeps (along with practiced comic timing and acting) would imply a bawdy sexual comedy where none was intended. It was actually quite easy to take such a work and do this. What was difficult for us was finding the time to memorize the lines and rehearse to pull it off. We were all pre-professionals (medicine, dentistry, law, business) and this was an extracurricular activity with little budget. Normally we relied on ad-lib.I never took the effort as anything other than a lampoon skit. There came a point that we realized we were defacing a great work of art and a tremendous dramatic scene that laid down the character and motives that would play themselves out on stage. Had I been charged with producing the play itself, never would I have dreamed of creating comedy where tragedy was written.In these post-modern days, however, where the author’s intent is no longer respected or considered, anyone is free to deconstruct a work and interpret it in their own way. Yes, Shakespeare has some comic moments written into his serious work. But they are not the dominant force.The Globe tragically mixes comedy and historical tragedy into muddle by their production of Anthony and Cleopatra. It is, after all a tragedy. Yet this production weighs comedy highhandedly for the first half of the production and less so as events unfold. If it was a comic skit it would have been well done. The comic timing and acting was good and play on words, made possible by the distance in time and place from Shakespeare’s English vocabulary and ours, lends itself to a vaudeville-like lampoon. Yet this is a tragedy and they perform the entire thing. It fails despite being so easy to conceive.Generally, the first parts of classic novels, plays and operas are devoted to establishing the characters, the setting, background and the underlying motives, flaws and strengths that will give context and meaning to the drama as it unfolds. Sometimes this may be dry and boring to contemporary audiences who are now used to tweets, soundbites and have little patience for drawn out scenes that have depth and require our attention. However, the effort to entertain by comedy, when overdone, detracts so from this essential task that the whole suffers greatly. It is one thing to occasionally nudge the audience and quite another to cater in such a way that what is produced is something foreign.Let us take for example a brief scene wherein Anthony and Octavian are discussing Egypt. Anthony speaks of the yearly Nile floods that deposit rich silt that has made the delta fertile and productive for ages. The importance of this brief account is critical to understanding the geopolitical forces driving events upon which the flawed and quite human characters are caught. Egypt would become the bread basket of the Empire and securing it a chief aim of Octavian’s Pax Romana. Yet this yearly, seemingly eternal cycle of flood and fertility, that at once provides great stores of food, wealth and security, is bigger and more powerful than the great men and women who people the events in history.In this production Anthony turns this key observation that would eventually lead to his destruction into a sexually explicit scene by making hand gestures of masturbation. Yes, the English “seed” is used to refer to both plant seed and human sperm. This comes from both the Latin “sperma” and the Greek σπερμα (sperma). And yes Anthony is spilling his seed in Egypt foolishly compared to the simple farmer who can spread his seed freely and be ensured of a good crop. All that is written into the dialog and understood. But by making it crass, especially in a rapid fire way, the historical and geopolitical import is lost. If you know the history and are familiar with the play it will pass. But most people are not, and future generations may come to experience it for the first and only time in this production. This is the problem that plaques this production.When events turn serious with war, fateful decisions, conflicting and competing desires and the tide of history washing all into disaster the actors must switch gears and try to create for us the depth and import of events. But they cannot. For what was not taken seriously before is lost when it is most needed. One winds up confused, feeling nothing for the characters and gets the sense of watching absurdity rather than great human tragedy. They could not pull it off. And because of this they are forced to employ once again, vaudeville in death scenes and battle reports.The acting was also disappointing. None of the actors, in my opinion, captured their assigned characters. Their reading of the verse was often quite wooden. Many of the actor’s voices were not naturally strong for a large theater forcing them to raise their voice to a shout which prevented their expressing subtleties demanded by the script. Cleopatra and Anthony come off Schizophrenic rather than complex and Octavian in a cardboard boy rather than the manipulative, patient and brilliant man of vision for the empire and his own ambition. So it runs through the cast.We were disappointed with this production and must disagree with the four star reviews on the cover that captured my attention. Towards the end I kept thinking that the ones who died early and left the play were shown true mercy.Looking back 40 years, thinking about why we never did our little lampoon of Julius Caesar, I believe fate and circumstance led us to the correct decision. It may have been funny for a moment but….