The Stratford Festival has launched a project to disseminate all of Shakespeare’s plays in high definition to cinemas worldwide. This first offering, recorded last summer, is an odd choice. I think of Antony and Cleopatra as a cross between two earlier Shakespeare dramas. Principal characters are holdovers from Julius Caesar, while the deaths of its lovers are similar to those in Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra,however, is a weaker play than either of its antecedents.
The play is primarily occupied with political rivalry, yet it depends on an impassioned relationship between a Roman general and the young queen of Egypt. That exotic romance is what gives Antony and Cleopatra its spark.
Action begins where Julius Caesar ends, with Octavius Caesar, Antony and Lepidus ruling the Roman state as a triumvirate. Such an arrangement cannot hold, especially with Antony sequestered far away with a foreign ruler with whom he is infatuated. Inevitably, the old comrades become enemies, and Antony loses a crucial battle. It’s not military defeat that causes his death, however, but the machinations of Cleopatra.
This production offers scant chemistry--plenty of kisses but no real sense of connection. Cleopatra is not exotic and not youthful. Yanna McIntosh comes across as a controlled and calculated woman doing a job. Perhaps she never was really in love with Antony, yet we’d like to believe there was an emotional bond, and some earlier actresses (Katharine Hepburn, Judi Dench) have tantalized us into that feeling.
Geraint Wyn Davies, the Antony, has less charisma than Patrick Stewart did in a Stratford England production I attended. Davies looks appropriately tortured but never convinces us he is the same man who electrified crowds with his “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech. Shakespeare no doubt wanted to show how energy can desert firebrands when they reach middle age, yet there needs to be a stronger reminder of what Antony used to be.
Gary Griffin’s interpretation has actors dashing in and out against dark backgrounds with no scenic appeal. Egyptian hieroglyphics sprawled across a platform are barely visible in the dim light. Even a line about the bright sun of Egypt is delivered in relative darkness.
Daniel Briere proves one of the production’s bright spots as Eros, giving a moving performance as the young servant whom Antony commands to kill him after he has been given the false news that Cleopatra has died.
Most Stratford Festival actors speak in flat American or Canadian accents. This causes a lack of differentiation when scenes shift to Africa and we hear no ethnic differences in speech. One oddity: Those of us who’ve seen Aida on Broadway and in opera are used to the sympathetic Ethiopians being black while the Egyptians, in contrast, are always white. Here it is the Egyptians who are black.
