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by William Shakespeare, directed by Gary Griffin

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

August 14-September 28, 2014

Cleopatra: “If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world

                    It is not worth leave-taking” (Act V)

Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays but also one of his most difficult to stage successfully.  While Romeo and Juliet concerned two teenagers from feuding families in the same city, Antony and Cleopatra concerns two figures who are rulers or co-rulers of two illustrious empires at war in the ancient world.  Romeo and Juliet are too young to have accomplished anything, their love and death being the deeds that define them.  Antony and Cleopatra, in contrast, are middle-aged and already renowned in the ancient world before they meet.  Their love is subject not only to intrigues between their two empires but to power struggles and shifting alliances in Rome.  The difficulty for a director is how to balance the vast and complex background of circum-Mediterranean politics with the intimate and equally complex story of two power-wielding, worldly-wise lovers.

American director Gary Griffin, who has previously directed only musicals at Stratford, comes closer than any director I have seen to keeping the love story of the titular characters in the foreground even as he makes clear how events in the turbulent background affect the couple’s decisions.  One method he uses is physical.  In Charlotte Dean’s design, the action throughout takes place primarily on a a cartouche-shaped dais on the stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre.  The cartouche, without its bottom line, is covered in hieroglyphics as are the two Egyptian-style columns like those at the Ramesseum in Luxor on either side of the entry to the stage.  Actors may fling Roman banners from the balcony but the columns, the dais and other stone relics with hieroglyphs are present in every scene.  This, in a very simple but effective way Griffin ensures that our thoughts, like those of Antony, never stray from Egypt no matter where in the ancient world a scene is set. 

Most of the imagery of the play concerns deliquescence.  This begins with one of Antony’s first remarks – “Let Rome in Tiber melt” (Act 1) – paralleled later by Cleopatra’s exclamation “Melt Egypt into Nile! (Act 2) and continues to Charmian’s prayer, “Dissolve, thick cloud, and rain” (Act 5).  The imagery is significant because it sums up Shakespeare’s view of the old world of Antony and Cleopatra as one that is about to vanish.  In many ways the two lovers live in a world of extravagant emotions that has already lost its validity to everyone around them.  Griffin recognizes this and has the actors give special emphasize to all the lines concerning dissolution. 

Though he has cut the text to allow the play to come in under three hours, Griffin leaves in a speech, usually cut in other productions where Octavius lists “the kings o’ the earth” (Act 3) including “Herod of of Jewry”.  Of the many obscure names this is the one Shakespeare’s audience would know because it signals that the action of the play is just before the Christian era which will eventually sweep away the belief systems of both empires, Roman and Egyptian. 

Griffin’s care to make the central issues clear in the kaleidoscopic world of the play has its greatest champion in Geraint Wyn Davies’ magnificent performance as Antony.  His is the best Antony I have seen in England or Canada.  Wyn Davies lends a tone of melancholy to all his speeches, whether romantic, heroic or political, as if he senses that his time has past.  Antony is already a legendary

figure but all that gives him the feeling of immortality in the present is his love for Cleopatra.  Wyn Davies allows us to see the action as Antony’s gradual acceptance of the inevitability of death, leaving behind all the petty and confused struggles of the worldly powers for the spiritual power of love, the only power that matters any longer.

Yanna McIntosh ought to have been the perfect choice for Cleopatra, especially since she is so powerful in her death scene of Act 5.  The difficulty with her performance is that she seems unable to unite Cleopatra’s mercurial temperament, which can make her seem childish, with a consciousness of nobility.  As Seana McKenna showed as Mary Stuart in Schiller’s play last year, it is possible for a queen to give a series of contradictory orders and still project her regal nature.  McIntosh’s Cleopatra seems to become an ordinary distressed woman in love whenever Cleopatra is beset with doubts rather than suggesting that fickleness is simply one of her prerogatives as queen.  Ideally, we should see that she is tiring of her own habit of game-playing until she plays the ultimate trick on Octavius by denying him the chance to lead her in triumph in Rome. 

Ben Carlson is one of the most intelligent iterations of Octavius ever seen at Stratford.  As usual his insight and the clarity of his diction bring out an uncommon amount of nuance to his character’s lines.  His Octavius’ speeches cannot be discounted as mere bluster but as concentrated Machiavellian politicking.  It is wonderful how the vision of the dead Cleopatra overwhelms him with reverence and awe replacing the careful calculation that had previously characterized him.

The fourth major figure of the play is Antony’s servant Enobarbus, who like Kent in King Lear or Camillo in The Winter’s Tale, abandons his master only to return to him in the end.  Tom McCamus should have been an excellent choice but his performance is strangely variable.  He begins the play with what seems to a Southern drawl to make Enobarbus into a kind of comic commentator on the action.  The drawl contrasts with everyone else and makes the character appear more dissolute than funny.  It also makes it difficult for McCamus to regain our confidence when he has to give such an important speech as the famous description in Act 2 on Cleopatra on her barge in which satire gives way to awe.  The result of not drawing us in to his character is that Enobarbus’ later agony and death from shame do not have the impact they should.    

All the senior Romans surrounding Octavius and Antony are well played – with Sean Arbuckle as Mecenas, Randy Hughson as Lepidus, Peter Hutt as Agrippa, ad Brad Rudy as Menas.  Carmen Grant makes Octavia a more mature and thoughtful woman than usual so that we feel angry that Octavia should be treated as a bartering chip by her own brother.  Stephen Russell’s voice and presence lend the Soothsayer greater authority than in some productions.  Brian Tree has the rare chance to play a warrior in the guise of the rebel Pompey and then contrasts that character’s wrath and craftiness with the peculiarly morbid insinuations of the Clown who gives Cleopatra the fatal asps.

What lets down the production more than anything is the wide gap in ability between the senior actors and the junior actors who play the roles of servants and messengers.  Though they have graduated from theatre schools, they still have difficulties with breath and voice control, diction and making sense of verse.  Notable exceptions are E. B. Smith as Cleopatra’s attendant Alexas and Andrew Lawrie as the messenger Diomedes.

Charlotte Dean has created a handsome production that conjures up all the richness of the ancient world that Stratford’s previous production in 2003 painfully did not.  Both the Egyptians and the Roman soldiers are clad in earth tones.  Symbolic contrast is provided on the one hand by the Roman politicians in their white togas and on the other by Cleopatra and her women as she prepares for death all clad in black.

Critic Northrop Frye used to teach that Antony and Cleopatra was more related to Shakespeare’s romances like Pericles or The Winter’s Tale than to his Roman or English history plays.  This is the first production of the play I’ve seen where the director seems to follow this path by showing how the title couple are caught in an ineluctable cosmic change over which they have no control.  The entire play then becomes a kind of Liebestod, where the central couple leave worldly transience behind to embrace the immortality their love have given them.  As Cleopatra says, “It is great / To do that thing that ends all other deeds; / Which shackles accidents and bolts up change”.  It is a pity Gary Griffin does not have the ideal cast needed to embody this vision, but one can glimpse it in his direction and in Geraint Wyn Davies’ Antony, and students of Shakespeare may wish to see this production for those reasons alone.                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Yanna McIntosh as Cleopatra and Geraint Wyn Davies as Antony; Geraint Wyn Davies as Anton, ©2014 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.