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Authors: William Shakespeare
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movie, with sharp cuts or slow dissolves as the pace requires. Miss [Tanya] Moisewitch’s costumes—gun-metal blues for the Romans,sandy browns for the Egyptians—have the heft and good taste that mark the entire production.” 35 Christopher Plummer’s Antony was seen as the “focus of sympathy,” while Zoe Caldwell played Cleopatra “more for our understanding than for our sympathy.” 36
There is evidence in these productions of an increasing awareness of the play’s politics, an element stressed in Evgenii Simonov’s 1971 production at the Vaktangov Theatre in Moscow, which used a translation by Boris Pasternak and starred Mikhail Ul’ianov and Iuliana Borisova. Geopolitical games were emphasized at the Bankside Globe in 1973. Tony Richardson’s first modern-dress production set in the 1920s, with Vanessa Redgrave in a red wig, white trouser suit, and sunglasses and Julian Glover’s Antony in military khaki, was intended as “a comment on power politics today.” 37 Critics on the whole were unimpressed and felt that the modern dress largely eliminated the distinction between Rome and Egypt. Notable overseas productions included Alf Sjöberg’s 1975 production in Stockholm and Robin Phillips’ the following year at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in which Keith Baxter and Maggie Smith played the leads on “an almost bare stage with a canopied set.” Baxter’s Antony was of “mythic stature” and Smith was “an inspiring Cleopatra of the seventies: one who was an actor of infinite variety and assured domination, yet vulnerable.” 38
Apart from the RSC productions discussed below, Peter Hall’s National Theatre production in 1987 with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins as a relatively mature pair of lovers was widely acclaimed:
Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench play the title roles as if they were not star actors. There is a moving and painful honesty in these performances: they are fleshy, aging people, both of them attractive and difficult, and they give out a sense of searing, wounded intimacy. 39
Alison Chitty’s designs were inspired by the paintings of Veronese, especially
Mars and Venus Bound by Cupid
: “This provided an apt visual equivalent to the play, both in its style and in its subject matter: a Renaissance view of a classical love affair. It created an ideal context for Peter Hall’s confidently paced, unostentatious reading ofthe play and for Judi Dench’s superb Cleopatra.” 40 The pictorial style of the Italian Renaissance also avoided “the now embarrassing theatricality of blacking up…and, more pertinently in 1987, the decision as to whether to employ actors of colour.” 41
The casting of Cleopatra has, ironically, proved problematic ever since women took over the part from boys. Race has now become an additional issue. Barry Rutter’s 1995 production for Northern Broadsides at the Viaduct in Halifax and Michael Bogdanov’s 1998 English Shakespeare Company production at the Hackney Empire both updated the play and cast black or mixed race actors as Cleopatra, Ishia Bennison and Cathy Tyson respectively. Rutter’s production was set in the north of England and simply staged—Pompey’s galley became a pub. For
Guardian
critic Michael Billington, “The great merit of Bogdanov’s updated production—with clocks on the sleekly sliding walls of Yannis Thavoris’s set depicting various time zones—is that it makes a complex play extremely clear.” 42
In 1999 Mark Rylance played Cleopatra in an all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Giles Block. Reviews tended to focus on Rylance’s performance, which at least one critic thought offered “a genuine revelation of the play and the role that I have never seen exploited before.” 43 Another thought it “a captivating performance. Rylance’s Cleopatra was a skipping coquette who roved across her stage, tossing her head of black curls and jangling her gold bracelets.” 44 Rylance and the production
There is evidence in these productions of an increasing awareness of the play’s politics, an element stressed in Evgenii Simonov’s 1971 production at the Vaktangov Theatre in Moscow, which used a translation by Boris Pasternak and starred Mikhail Ul’ianov and Iuliana Borisova. Geopolitical games were emphasized at the Bankside Globe in 1973. Tony Richardson’s first modern-dress production set in the 1920s, with Vanessa Redgrave in a red wig, white trouser suit, and sunglasses and Julian Glover’s Antony in military khaki, was intended as “a comment on power politics today.” 37 Critics on the whole were unimpressed and felt that the modern dress largely eliminated the distinction between Rome and Egypt. Notable overseas productions included Alf Sjöberg’s 1975 production in Stockholm and Robin Phillips’ the following year at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in which Keith Baxter and Maggie Smith played the leads on “an almost bare stage with a canopied set.” Baxter’s Antony was of “mythic stature” and Smith was “an inspiring Cleopatra of the seventies: one who was an actor of infinite variety and assured domination, yet vulnerable.” 38
Apart from the RSC productions discussed below, Peter Hall’s National Theatre production in 1987 with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins as a relatively mature pair of lovers was widely acclaimed:
Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench play the title roles as if they were not star actors. There is a moving and painful honesty in these performances: they are fleshy, aging people, both of them attractive and difficult, and they give out a sense of searing, wounded intimacy. 39
Alison Chitty’s designs were inspired by the paintings of Veronese, especially
Mars and Venus Bound by Cupid
: “This provided an apt visual equivalent to the play, both in its style and in its subject matter: a Renaissance view of a classical love affair. It created an ideal context for Peter Hall’s confidently paced, unostentatious reading ofthe play and for Judi Dench’s superb Cleopatra.” 40 The pictorial style of the Italian Renaissance also avoided “the now embarrassing theatricality of blacking up…and, more pertinently in 1987, the decision as to whether to employ actors of colour.” 41
The casting of Cleopatra has, ironically, proved problematic ever since women took over the part from boys. Race has now become an additional issue. Barry Rutter’s 1995 production for Northern Broadsides at the Viaduct in Halifax and Michael Bogdanov’s 1998 English Shakespeare Company production at the Hackney Empire both updated the play and cast black or mixed race actors as Cleopatra, Ishia Bennison and Cathy Tyson respectively. Rutter’s production was set in the north of England and simply staged—Pompey’s galley became a pub. For
Guardian
critic Michael Billington, “The great merit of Bogdanov’s updated production—with clocks on the sleekly sliding walls of Yannis Thavoris’s set depicting various time zones—is that it makes a complex play extremely clear.” 42
In 1999 Mark Rylance played Cleopatra in an all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Giles Block. Reviews tended to focus on Rylance’s performance, which at least one critic thought offered “a genuine revelation of the play and the role that I have never seen exploited before.” 43 Another thought it “a captivating performance. Rylance’s Cleopatra was a skipping coquette who roved across her stage, tossing her head of black curls and jangling her gold bracelets.” 44 Rylance and the production
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