Over-hyped, in expectation and action: Antony and Cleopatra at the NT
Antony and Cleopatra
Olivier Theatre
National Theatre
Circle G71, £15
8 December 2018
NT page
Anticipation was running high for Antony and Cleopatra. I’ve only see this play once before. To rest it is glorious. I thought Ralph Fiennes was fantastic on stage in The Master Builder. Sophie Okonedo is great in everything. Everyone I knew who’d been said it was fantastic. It was gonna be good.
Perhaps my expectations were too high; perhaps I should never again book a ticket for the back row of the Olivier circle. I’ve never enjoyed something from back there and have always blamed the production: maybe I should wake up and blame the seat. That said, I can’t see why it should be such a turn-off – you can see the whole stage, you can see people’s faces, you can hear every word.
So maybe I can blame the production. The umbrella criticism I have is of the pace, relentlessly maintained, forever striving against anyone ever feeling bored through the play’s lengthy set of events. I found it to have the opposite effect. With such an onwards view there is little opportunity to consider motivation, what compels these characters to do the extraordinary things they do. The cuts to the text further serve to confuse rather than whisk along. I know this is not a silly play; but it felt like a silly play.
The casting was of a piece with the silliness. My guess is that both Fiennes and Okonedo chose to accentuate the vitality of these two iconic lovers, to imagine them as strange beings of extraordinary celebrity, famed for the very reason of their intense charisma and energy. Not such a stretch for either of them, you would have thought, but each laid it on thick, obscuring the inner worlds of Antony and Cleopatra with a froth of visceral vivacity. Combined with the over-eager pace these two became tedious pawns, acting purely to move us from one line to the next until they finally make it to the final tragedy.
Of the rest of the cast I fear Tim McMullan, an excellent Toby Belch, is miscast as Enobarbus – he encapsulates the rascally toper brilliantly, but the hardened soldier? I just don’t buy it, and therefore don’t feel the final horror of his action. Another silly person doing silly things. I was otherwise middling to positive about everyone else, Sargon Yelda’s cheerful Pompey an entertaining high-point.
At times I veered towards respect for director SImon Godwin and set and costume designers Hildegard Bechtler and Evie Gurney as they spared no expense. A glitzy cast deserves a glitzy production, you might argue, and there’s so much that is a feast for the eyes, from Cleopatra’s endlessly gorgeous costumes to thrill of Pompey’s ship crashing towards us out of the revolve. But when you’re not able to capture the most important thing in a play these pleasures quickly pale, their splendour becoming an egregious irrelevance.
No comments yet.