Helen Mirren's sensual Cleopatra is let down by a lacklustre lover

(Daily Telegraph 22nd October 1998)

Charles Spencer on Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre

THE National Theatre is in the happy position of being critic-proof with this new production. With the exception of a few tickets available only to personal callers each day, the entire run is already sold out. If you want to put bums on seats hire Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman to play two of the greatest roles in Shakespeare.

The National has been on a standstill grant for the last six years, amounting to a £2 million cut in real terms, and, despite continuous box-office success, its reserves are now dangerously low. If anyone can keep Britain's flagship theatre afloat, it is the theatrical director, Trevor Nunn, perhaps the canniest of all hit-makers.

Nevertheless, I bet he is secretly glad that the star casting here paid such handsome dividends before the reviews appeared. This isn't a disastrous Antony and Cleopatra, and it has some fine moments, particularly when Mirren is centre stage.

Yet the crucial sexual chemistry on which any great production ultimately depends is fatally absent, and Sean Mathias's staging is full of minor irritants and long passages when the dramatic energy seems underpowered.

None of this is helped by the design or the appallingly intrusive percussive sound effects, which make ancient Egypt sound as though it is suffering from a disastrous crisis in its plumbing system.

David Belugou's costumes are almost comically traditional, complete with togas and scantily clad handmaidens who might have stepped straight out of Carry on Cleo.

Meanwhile, Tim Hatley's clunking abstract set, featuring a great metallic semi-circle representing heaven knows what, contrives to be both cumbersome and stubbornly unatmospheric. Only in the final scene in Cleopatra's monument, with the stage filled with hundreds of candles, does this most sensual of plays achieve anything approaching visual magic.

A production can survive a rotten design. What it can't always survive is a performance from Alan Rickman. He was the worst Hamlet in recent memory and now he gives us a thoroughly unengaging and at times downright lazy Antony.

From the start, he seems far too weary for anything approaching passion. Apparently suffering from the hangover from hell, his Antony delivers his speeches in a languid monotonous drawl that often does fatal damage to both the rhythm and the sense of the verse.

He approaches Mirren's Cleopatra with all the enthusiasm of a man contemplating his tax return, and you get the impression that almost every chap in the audience must be far more taken with her than the semi-detached actor actually appearing with her on stage. Only when Antony approaches the heart of loss and despair at the end does the performance acquire anything approaching emotional intensity.

In these circumstances, Mirren's performance is heroic. With her spangly dress and braided hair, she initially looks more like the faintly raddled queen of a suburban disco than of old Nile, but she impressively captures Cleopatra's volatility of mood, and though her variety may be less than infinite, she is funny, touching, sexy, capricious and, at moments, achingly vulnerable.

She is especially fine in the last act, when Cleopatra suddenly transcends the pettiness of her own nature in speeches of ravishing beauty (the continued used of background sound effects here is a disgrace). Mirren rises superbly to the verbal challenge, and as she bravely strips off her simple white costume to don her royal robes and go exquisitely to her death, this often frustrating production finally achieves the rapt magnificence that has eluded it for so long.

There is some strong support. Samuel West captures Octavius Caesar's chilling mixture of priggishness and pragmatism, while also suggesting that a human heart beats somewhere beneath the politician's smooth patrician facade. Finbar Lynch is also a compelling Enobarbus, both chorus and tragic character in his own right, and with a far stronger personal magnetism than Rickman's. But the production's real strengths aren't enough to compensate for its dismaying weaknesses. Michael Bogdanov's sparky modern-dress version, now playing in Hackney, is both more enjoyable and comes closer to the heart of the play.