Read Online Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
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been erected in London in 1878.
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that simpler productions were staged, influenced by the theories of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, who advocated a return to the continuous staging of the Elizabethan theaters. William Bridges-Adams’s production forthe 1921 Stratford Festival was played with few cuts and only one short interval, but it was Robert Atkins’ 1922 “non-stop” production at the Old Vic which decisively affected future staging. The play was popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s, partly thanks to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 and a continued cultural fascination with Egypt. John Gielgud played a romantic Antony to Dorothy Green’s voluptuous Cleopatra with Ralph Richardson as Enobarbus in Harcourt Williams’s successful 1930 Old Vic production. This featured semipermanent sets and simple designs inspired by the Renaissance painters Veronese and Tiepolo.
The expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky’s 1936 Stratford-upon-Avon production, on the other hand, ran for only four nights, due in part to his own radical cutting and rearranging of the text, but also to his Cleopatra. The Russian Eugenie Leontovich’s pronunciation was mercilessly satirized, although Donald Wolfit’s Antony was admired, as was Margaret Rawling’s Charmian, praised by the renowned theater critic James Agate for the way she “refrained from wiping Cleopatra off the stage till after she was dead.” 14
Glen Byam Shaw’s 1946 production at the Piccadilly Theatre used a versatile permanent set consisting of a single solid central “column-tower-monument with a recess beneath reminiscent of ‘an air-raid shelter or an elevator with sliding doors.’” The design has been perceived by theater historians as “post-fascist” in that it seemed “to belong to the ‘architecture of coercion’ that celebrates the centralisation of power and looks back to the monumental forms of the fascist architecture of the thirties.” 15 Godfrey Tearle and Edith Evans were both praised for their individual performances. The fifty-eight-year-old Evans, playing the part of Cleopatra in a red wig, was described as “best in the raillery and mischief.” Both leads were judged “at their best when they are apart.” 16 Tearle’s “rich, resonant voice and noble presence” convinced the London
Times
reviewer that “for once we have an Antony who is really an old lion dying.” 17 He went on to play the part the following year opposite Katharine Cornell in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in a record-breaking run, directed by her husband Guthrie McClintic. The production controversially updated and politicized the play: “Shakespeare’s soldiersare Nazis, Pompey a Göring, Caesar a Baldur von Schirach, the rank and file a squad of heiling stormtroopers.” 18
In 1951 for the Festival of Britain, Michael Benthall alternated Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
with George Bernard Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra
at the St James’s Theatre; the leads in both cases were the glamorous celebrity couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The venture was not without problems, as the Oliviers’ biographer records:
The plays
as a pair
were tremendously successful throughout the London season, and were to repeat that success in New York, but it was really a marriage of incompatibles. Even Michael Benthall’s production and Roger Furse’s sets, all of which were designed to fuse them into a whole could not disguise the fact that Shaw’s comedy was a weak partner. 19
Critics were divided about individual performances. The
New York Times
was fulsome: “Miss Leigh’s Cleopatra is superb…Mr. Olivier’s Antony is worthy of her mettle.” 20
The Commonweal
was more cautious:
Olivier’s Antony is not perfect…But it is still a full-scale, clearly defined piece of work, and fascinating to watch. Miss Leigh’s task is of a different order. Instead of
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that simpler productions were staged, influenced by the theories of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, who advocated a return to the continuous staging of the Elizabethan theaters. William Bridges-Adams’s production forthe 1921 Stratford Festival was played with few cuts and only one short interval, but it was Robert Atkins’ 1922 “non-stop” production at the Old Vic which decisively affected future staging. The play was popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s, partly thanks to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 and a continued cultural fascination with Egypt. John Gielgud played a romantic Antony to Dorothy Green’s voluptuous Cleopatra with Ralph Richardson as Enobarbus in Harcourt Williams’s successful 1930 Old Vic production. This featured semipermanent sets and simple designs inspired by the Renaissance painters Veronese and Tiepolo.
The expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky’s 1936 Stratford-upon-Avon production, on the other hand, ran for only four nights, due in part to his own radical cutting and rearranging of the text, but also to his Cleopatra. The Russian Eugenie Leontovich’s pronunciation was mercilessly satirized, although Donald Wolfit’s Antony was admired, as was Margaret Rawling’s Charmian, praised by the renowned theater critic James Agate for the way she “refrained from wiping Cleopatra off the stage till after she was dead.” 14
Glen Byam Shaw’s 1946 production at the Piccadilly Theatre used a versatile permanent set consisting of a single solid central “column-tower-monument with a recess beneath reminiscent of ‘an air-raid shelter or an elevator with sliding doors.’” The design has been perceived by theater historians as “post-fascist” in that it seemed “to belong to the ‘architecture of coercion’ that celebrates the centralisation of power and looks back to the monumental forms of the fascist architecture of the thirties.” 15 Godfrey Tearle and Edith Evans were both praised for their individual performances. The fifty-eight-year-old Evans, playing the part of Cleopatra in a red wig, was described as “best in the raillery and mischief.” Both leads were judged “at their best when they are apart.” 16 Tearle’s “rich, resonant voice and noble presence” convinced the London
Times
reviewer that “for once we have an Antony who is really an old lion dying.” 17 He went on to play the part the following year opposite Katharine Cornell in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in a record-breaking run, directed by her husband Guthrie McClintic. The production controversially updated and politicized the play: “Shakespeare’s soldiersare Nazis, Pompey a Göring, Caesar a Baldur von Schirach, the rank and file a squad of heiling stormtroopers.” 18
In 1951 for the Festival of Britain, Michael Benthall alternated Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
with George Bernard Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra
at the St James’s Theatre; the leads in both cases were the glamorous celebrity couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The venture was not without problems, as the Oliviers’ biographer records:
The plays
as a pair
were tremendously successful throughout the London season, and were to repeat that success in New York, but it was really a marriage of incompatibles. Even Michael Benthall’s production and Roger Furse’s sets, all of which were designed to fuse them into a whole could not disguise the fact that Shaw’s comedy was a weak partner. 19
Critics were divided about individual performances. The
New York Times
was fulsome: “Miss Leigh’s Cleopatra is superb…Mr. Olivier’s Antony is worthy of her mettle.” 20
The Commonweal
was more cautious:
Olivier’s Antony is not perfect…But it is still a full-scale, clearly defined piece of work, and fascinating to watch. Miss Leigh’s task is of a different order. Instead of
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