or audiences with memories
that go back 30 years or so, it is a point of general agreement that nobody
has ever seen a satisfactory version of this play: and the return
of Peter Brook to Stratford after almost a decade aroused hopes of a landmark
production in the class of his Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The event, as it turned out, makes an austerely
muted contrast with its two illustrious predecessors. Anyone visiting the
show in hopes of spectacular novelties will sit through its three and a
half hours in vain; though it is obvious within the first few minutes of
the piece, presenting the opposing worlds of Rome and Egypt, that Brook
and his designer Sally Jacobs have hit on a wonderfully simple solution
to the play's notoriously sprawling layout.
The stage consists of a semicircle of opaque
glass panels with two doorways affording the view of a neutral backcloth.
The glass acts partly as a gauze that can be obliterated for foreground
action; it also permits rapid switches between foreground and background.
This antiseptic setting stands in ironic contrast
to both the form and the content of the play; and when you notice that,
the purposes of the production begin to unfold. The received idea of Antony
and Cleopatra is that of a tragic love affair between two doomed,
great-hearted principals ranged against a cold-blooded political adversary.
And with that expectation, it is not surprising that productions so often
leave you dissatisfied. Brook's approach to Shakespeare has always been
that he gives you more from moment to moment than any other dramatist. And
in this case, Brook goes out of his way to point up all the things that
do not conform to the myth of a world well lost.
The first big surprise is the gentle sweet-natured
Octavius of Jonathan Pryce (especially considering this actor's fire-eating
track record). The attachment between Alan Howard's Antony and this Octavius
is more than an onerous political duty. There is straightforward human love
between the veteran and the younger man: and after their first parley, each
side purring his point with the slow vigilance of a chess player, the reconciliation
is sealed with a delighted embrace. The same goes for David Suchet's Pompey,
who begins with loudly unselfconfident blustering and then seizes Antony's
patronizing hand of friendship with intense relief.
Both Octavius and Pompey look up to Antony
as a senior partner by whom they have always felt outclassed. Antony shares
this view: hence the incredulity on both sides when he meets his first defeat.
Mr. Howard collapses and covers his eyes, unable to contemplate the unbelievable
humiliation. As for Octavius, he begins from that moment to lose his innocent
charm and develop into the icy calculating demigod of the later scenes.
With this treatment of Rome there is a far
stronger sense of what Antony has thrown away. Nor can it be weighed in
the balance against what he gains. Direct human affection of the Roman kind
is the one thing he cannot get from Glenda Jackson's otherwise inexhaustibly
various Cleopatra.
They make a stupendous and utterly unmoving
pair. They are plainly victims of a folle à deux and the production
shows in merciless detail the price they pay for it. Brook takes his cue
from Shakespeare's prolonged treatment of the events. Antony is defeated
twice; he then fails to kill himself. It is a terrible ignoble mess, and
in showing it to be precisely that with Mr. Howard finally stumbling towads
the monument in an unbelieving daze, the production ideliberately forfeits
any aspirations to the heroic. "I am dying Egypt, dying", Mr.
Howard complains at his consort's continued appetite for his body. The point
is finally driven home in Cleopatra's death scene: the clown with the asp
is for once a real red-nosed comedian, who delays her grand departure from
the world with a series of false exits.
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