TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Antony and Cleopatra
Roundhouse Winter 2010-2011
Antony and Cleopatra can be played with palpable sexual energy between the actors or as an older couple living on the memories of their passions, but there must at least be embers, if not sparks, or there is no play here.
And the biggest failing of Michael Boyd's problem-filled RSC transfer from Stratford is that there is absolutely nothing going on between Darrell D'Silva's Antony and Kathryn Hunter's Cleopatra - no chemistry between them now and no indication that there ever was any passion between the characters.
She might as well be his nagging mother for all the sense we get of any bond between them, and indeed Kathryn Hunter does play Cleopatra more like a passive-aggressive bullying Jewish or Italian mother than as a sexual temptress.
Nor does she give the character any shading or colours beyond her leech-like demands on Antony, so that you could be forgiven for suspecting that more thought was devoted to her constant costume changes than to her characterisation. (And perhaps it is because the actress gives us so little of the character that we have the leisure to notice how frequently she slips and calls him Anthony.)
Darrell D'Silva does offer a sense of the man who once was a great general but can now only pathetically imitate himself when trying to be warlike, so that ironically Antony's scenes without Cleopatra are his most successfully realised.
Also on the positive side, this is one of the few modern dress productions that doesn't grate on the eye and ear - usually, soldiers carrying machine guns and talking of swords are just silly, but it works here - and John Mackay plays Caesar as a faceless middle-management bureaucrat in a nice contrast to D'Silva's grizzled old soldier. You may not quite believe that this apparatchik Caesar would make it to the top, but he's certainly the sort who would survive any corporate battles.
And that's really all that I have to say good about this production. Too many in the secondary cast have very poor enunciation, reducing their lines to gabble, the battle scenes are beautifully choreographed but totally opaque, and no one else really registers - the admirable Greg Hicks, in the bit part of the Soothsayer, effortlessly dominates the stage for his two minutes more than anyone else ever does.
And Michael Boyd's staging is sometimes shockingly bad, with no sense of the needs of a long thrust stage. Too many actors are planted for too long in one spot, and the two-thirds of the audience sitting on the sides of the stage will spend a lot of the play looking at actors' backs.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Antony and Cleopatra - RSC Roundhouse 2010
