Not too long ago I got to see the NTLive (National Theater) broadcast of Antony and Cleopatra, with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo in the title roles. This is the advantage of living in a wonderful city like Dallas, with so many the cultural opportunities, including theater broadcasts at the Angelika right next to SMU. I’ve always been fond of that play, because it is the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, back in 2009 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and it so happens that PSF will present a new production of the play this summer. After seeing the broadcast I watched the DVD of the 2017 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production directed by Iqbal Khan and starring Antony Byrne and Josette Simon. For this blog I want to compare the two, but for those of you who don’t have the time to read blog posts past their first paragraph, my one-line review is that the RSC version is superior in every way.
First, the setting. The RSC version wisely keeps the play in ancient times, while the NTLive production sets it in some vaguely modern setting where army officers, some of whom arrive in submarines, wear neat, clear-colored, freshly ironed military fatigues or crisp military uniforms that make them look like they are wearing Halloween costumes. It has become fashionable to set Shakespeare plays in modern times, and when the plays tell us something about mankind’s unbridled ambition or thirst for power, there certainly is a case for the transposition. Recent broadcast productions of Julius Caesar and Macbeth did so to great effect. But Antony & Cleopatra is about the love between two sovereigns, and there is little to be gained in reminding us that love for a woman can bring a man down, except to emphasize the fact that women rulers might have been more common in the Antiquity than today. In addition, designers in the NTLive production, in the pre-show features, made a big fuss about Cleopatra’s dresses, including the replica of a yellow dress that Beyonce is said to have worn but this made Cleopatra look like a bored housewife from the upper society circles who is more interested in looking sophisticated than ruling over a country. In fact Cleopatra looked like her husband was off to war and she didn’t really rule over anything except the heart of an old soldier from the enemy’s camp. The Cleopatra in the NTLive production looked like “the wife of”. She was so enamored of Antony it looked like a miracle Antony was the only one who had to worry about power intrigues and place coups. In contrast, the Cleopatra in the RSC production looked like a queen. It wasn’t about her clothes, usually fairly simple although elegant, but it was about the way she carried herself, and little details like the manner her hair was pulled up high over her head. That was a woman ruler I believed in. I do have to give NTLive’s Sophie Okonedo credit for an outstanding last scene at the monument (with a live snake!) She really nailed it there.
My favorite actor in the NTLive production was Tunji Kasim as Julius Caesar, who gave a solid performance as a poised and determined young leader, but there was a clearer theme of generation rift in the RSC production where all the young men seemed hotblooded and eager to fight.
I found myself quite bored by the NTLive production, which pretended to offer something fresh in giving Antony’s camp the look of an army of today and shed no new insight on the play, giving it instead a vague hybrid look. At times I was so bored I started imagining more thought-provoking productions, including a gender-bending one I dubbed Antonia and Cleopatro, in a world where women wage war and men rulers are oddities. (If you’re going to talk about female rulers today, you might as well emphasize the lack of them full out.) Other ones I thought about were set during the Vietnam War with a U.S. general in love with a Vietnamese woman, or something in Russia in the eighteenth century with Cleopatra looking like Catherine the Great.
Everything in the RSC production was superb, from the sets to the costumes to the lighting, and the change of expression in the actors’ faces, for instance when Cleopatra learns Antony married Octavia or Antony is told Cleopatra is dead, shows a dimension of theater acting that places both Antony Byrne and Josette Simon among the great actors of our time.
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