ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA: Lean, mean, and with a miscast queen. |
LENOX — Critic Harold Bloom compares Cleopatra, more in her infinite vitality than in her “infinite variety,” to that Shakespearean life force Sir John Falstaff. Perhaps he, then, would approve Shakespeare & Company artistic director Tina Packer’s rendering of “Old Nile,” which is bawdier than seductive. It’s not that Packer is too old; Vanessa Redgrave played Cleopatra at 60, and she’s surely not the only aging diva to take on the Bard’s aging diva — who in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA is rendered as a more seasoned mantrap than the actual Cleopatra was when she made Marc Antony her third Roman conquest, after Gnaeus Pompey and Julius Caesar. Neither is it that Packer’s performance chops are dull: despite having put acting on the back burner while she steered S&C through its first 30 years, this hands-on acting teacher has galvanic force and a sonorous, full-bodied way with Shakespearean verse. The scene in which she attacks the messenger bringing news of her lover’s politically expedient marriage, then rears up before buckling in palpable physical pain, makes your hair stand on end. But there is too much of “dungy earth” — a territory claimed for the pair by the Egyptian queen’s over-the-hill Roman-soldier paramour — about her. Approaching her ritual, theatrical suicide, Cleopatra declares, “I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life.” And that is not something the warm, hearty Packer is capable of doing.
So it is that S&C’s Antony and Cleopatra (in repertory through September 2) starts out with one strike — a miscast Queen of the Nile — against it. Although one misses such fine S&C defectors as Jonathan Epstein and Dan McCleary, Nigel Gore, who last summer played Claudius to Packer’s Gertrude in Hamlet (her first foray onto the Shakespeare boards with the troupe she founded), is less an oddity as Antony. The English import proves a volatile, self-aware if besotted, aptly grizzled Antony. He even brings to the character some well-earned ironic exasperation, as when he learns that rumors of Cleopatra’s death (started by her) have been greatly exaggerated. Of course, this Plutarch-inspired play — part tragedy, part history — is as much about the showdown between up-and-coming ruler-bureaucrat Octavius Caesar and outmoded “Herculean Roman” Antony for control of the Empire as it is about the unstable if unstoppable passion of Antony and Cleopatra for each other and their mirroring mythologies. And the S&C production, helmed by associate artistic director Michael Hammond, makes the politics of the play — ruthlessly rational on Caesar’s part, eruptive and distrustful on Antony and Cleopatra’s — unusually clear.
No mean feat since Antony and Cleopatra, with some 40 characters and a scenario that hops all around the “ranged empire” at stake, is almost as excessive as its breathtaking, self- and mate-idolatrizing poetry. S&C utilizes a slimmed-down, somewhat rearranged version of the play created for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Here, 12 actors portray 19 characters (some of them conflations), and the back-and-forth between Rome and Egypt is fleet and clear — more so than the whiplash-inducing turns the Bard builds into the title characters’ relationship, in which sexual passion wars with near-paranoid fear of being sold out or betrayed. Although lacking in convincing sexual chemistry, Gore and Packer do convey the politically driven volatility of the title pair’s alliance, which bounces between the boudoir (where this production places them at the get-go, tangled up with each other and multi-colored diaphanous covers) and the world’s stage, with both self-dramatizing personages, particularly the sly Cleopatra, as much acting as being themselves. In the end, it is Antony’s tragedy that is the more poignant. He has lost his warrior self to his late-life dotage — and he knows it. Cleopatra, on the other hand, writes large her own and her lover’s press releases even as she clasps asp to chest and sticks painted toe into the River Styx, an echo of her famous barge gliding in along with her.
It’s not easy to get an impression in edgewise when sharing the stage with Shakespeare’s legendary if doomed East-West lovers. But some of the supporting players here manage it, particularly Craig Baldwin, whose skinhead Octavius Caesar looks like a Buddhist monk but silkily portrays the calculating and abstemious chief-executive-to-be — who, told of his nemesis’s death, correctly if not altogether dispassionately observes, “We could not stall together/In the whole world.” Baldwin also makes Caesar’s devotion to his sister, Antony’s second abandoned wife, just a little creepy. Tony Molina is effective in a trio of roles, and Walton Wilson brings to Antony’s loyal-almost-to-the-end crony, Enobarbus, both a soldier’s ribald roughness and enough poetic muster for the ravishingly evocative snapshot that is the barge speech.
