Antony and Cleopatra

The Times 26th October 1998

 

The National Theatre has some hard thinking to do. Sean Mathias's much heralded production of Antony and Cleopatra, which brings Helen Mirren back to the British stage after four years, is its first Shakespeare under Trevor Nunn's stewardship, and its first at the Olivier in more than three years. It is a big, raw, lumbering affair, both old-fashioned and relentlessly smart, ambitious but pedestrian. Bringing in new talent is fine, but directing anything, and most especially Shakespeare, at the National Theatre ought to be something you work towards, a mark and reward of achievement. Mathias has worked at the National Theatre before, and with distinction, but this is his first Shakespeare, and it shows. The pace is sluggish: it entirely lacks that sweep and rhythm without which this, of all plays, becomes a series of big scenes in fancy dress. Tim Hatley's set makes things worse: a huge vertical arch of carved granitelike panels that cuts right across the stage and that, most of the time, reduces the acting area to half its size. So what is the Olivier for? The depth of the stage ought to be a practical and metaphorical expression of the depths of the play. When Mathias uses the revolve, it is mostly as if he were showing you that he knew it was there.

On one level Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy of mutual possession, the condition that hurts because it is desired; but people seldom realise that the two lovers are only together on stage for rather less than half the time. This is why the two roles demand such skill and intensity: a combination of physical magnetism and poetic power that makes you sense that they are always at the heart of the play and are together even in absence.

Mirren is best at Cleopatra's selfishness and chameleon caprice. Even in her few, and mostly rather tame, erotic moments with Antony, there is a hint that one wrong move and she will turn on him with her claws out. Mirren worked at the RSC during the golden years of Trevor Nunn and John Barton, which is partly why she is the only one to make you feel that she is speaking not just a theatrical text but dramatic poetry in which rhythms are the key to both meaning and feeling. The rest of the cast, from this point of view, ranges from the ordinary to the deplorable.

The crucial thing missing from her performance is Cleopatra's majestic vulgarity: the royal wench, the regal fishwife. You can't imagine this collected, even slightly prim woman hop forty paces through the public street. This is a middle-class performance, almost suburban, with matching gestures and situations - until the end, when Mirren sheds the tame restraints and lack of imagination of the production and burns with a gemlike flame, like a queen.

Alan Rickman's Antony is a mystery. What does Cleopatra see in him? He is a heavy, dour, introverted party, entirely without magnetism, sexual or otherwise, and saturnine, which is the posh word for surly. When he says, "In the East my pleasure lies," he sounds like a weary accountant on his way to the Tube station. His relationship with Enobarbus is virtually nonexistent, which is partly why Finbar Lynch gives such an uncharacteristically one-dimensional performance. Rickman's voice is resonant but monotonous. It has no variety of tone, no lyricism, little feeling, and not a whiff of the kind of passion that beats and throbs against a man's ribs. For such a distinguished actor, his verse speaking is shockingly bad, full of garbled lines, and slurred words with their final syllables inaudible from the fifth row of the stalls. This is the kind of high-maintenance but slipshod work that gives serious theatre a bad name.

Needless to say, the political scenes are hopeless: chunks of ponderous, very blank verse, with no sense of big players, of real power being exercised, of deals being deviously stitched up behind the scenes and presented as a breakthrough. Yet that is precisely the sort of thing that makes Shakespeare a dramatist for our time. The National must get its act together and decide how to play him; if it does not set standards, who will?

 

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