As someone who studied Shakespeare as an undergrad and a grad, i'd been given to think of Antony and Cleopatra as one of the tragedies. Tragedy, i'd learned, at least from the audience perspective, has to do with our experience of a sense of loss: that by the tragic hero's death, no matter how problematic that hero, like Macbeth or Hamlet, their going leaves the world emptier than with them in it. The other accepted truism is that the tragic figure must also be something above and beyond ourselves. Hence, usually royal, but that royalty has some greater biggness to it than title.
This week i saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Antony and Cleopatra, and have been puzzling ever since, where's the tragedy? where's the loss? Does the loss overbalance what's left? is this play a tragedy? What made me think it was before?
Or maybe the fault is with the production: Is this a really crappy production of the play which misses delivering on the tragic; where all we get is a look at some particularly problem characters with more money than sense, or is this a really accurate presentation of the text, where we don't get tragedy, because who's sad to see either Antony or Cleopatra go if who they are are the self-interested, petty, monied shites they seem to be? At least with Octavian the last one standing, he at least seems to care about keeping the state running and ending civil war. What's happening here??
In the production, there's little opportunity to see grandeur of what is lost by Antony and Cleopatra's eventual death, even though we are left with Octavian - at least he seems to be more economical with the troops he spends in battle, where Antony's and Cleopatra's decisions cost lives carelessly.
In the early scenes of Act 1, where Cleopatra repeatedly entreats Antony to hear the messengers from Rome, there is an opportunity to see Cleopatra as at least somewhat politically astute, cajoling Antony towards dealing with a potential crisis in Rome. Not a spec of that awareness in the RSC production - the words are played literally: Cleopatra is saying that Antony's wife just wants to get him away from her - nothing else. There's no hint here that she is striving to use that as an excuse to get Antony to deal with his reponsibilities: the lines are played like this is exactly what she means: she's jealous of Fulvia's potential to provoke Antony into leaving her. That the personal actions of these people have highly political consequences seems either oblivious to Antony and Cleopatra or they just don't care. This portrayl of cleopatra has, however, been celebrated by some reviewers.
Antony is also played as simply reactive, and consequently dangerous, starting from his if Cleopatra says see the messengers then he won't see them - until he's alone. Not particularly appealing is his blaming of her for everything that doesn't go right for him, whether it's his enjoyment of egypt itself - bonds he suddenly feels he must break - or his fleeing after Cleopatra in the battle of Actium . She should have known he'd leave if she did. That's part of the problem: they act as if they're the only people involved. The social cost of their highly personal reactions to each other have a higher cost than anything Octavian does in the play. And perhaps it's that this production doesn't provide a way to see this self-involvement as anything particularly noble that makes it difficult to experience the deaths of either as particularly tragic.
Indeed, in the production, Stewart's Antony is in deep need of therapy: in the second half, post Actium, he starts yelling without much provocation. He goes from quiet recitation to full throated yelling. It's not a subtle performance, and that was a surprise and disappointment. There's also not much listening to others on stage. For instance, in the battle of Actium preparation when everyone is telling him not to fight by the sea, the line in the text is "Antony: The Sea, the sea" - and that's about how Stewart delivers it - a throw away. He's not listening, getting angry and responding with "if you tell me this, then i'll do that" - there's just no listening. He's in his own little world. No wonder so many soldiers abandon ship as it were: he's out of touch with reality and who wants to die for a delusion? Perhaps then, that's a reasonable interpretation of Antony: he doesn't care about how his orders are received. He can just do what he wants.
But likewise later when he has Ceasar's messenger whipped who has kissed Cleopatra's hand, Stewart's Antony just goes into a rant, looking like Mr Magoo in a kilt having a fit, arms flailing. We see no sense of jealousy; he's just a demented old man who thinks his plaything's being taken away, rather than someone feeling the sense of his loss. In a following scene, he'll insist that one of his own soldiers whose done well take and kiss cleopatra's hand. There's not one look on the stage that shows anyone -including Antony - is aware of the contrast.
Now maybe all that is a legitimate way to play the text, but it just puts us at an increasing distance from the character - and sure tragedy does that too: watch Macbeth or Hamlet at their worst - Hamlet causing the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for instance, but they recover their nobility by the end of the play; we are brought back to them, usually out of growing awareness of how much worse those around them are. In this production, we are never close to the characters, except perhaps in the first act, but that's more politeness around characters we don't exactly know, than any real feeling of closeness. On hearing of Enobarbus's defection, Antony sends Enobarbus's goods after him rather than keeping them to supplement his own war chest. Enobarbus and his new Roman cohorts recognize Antony as "a Jove" in this generosity. But the act is given short shrift in the production, such that again, any sense of Antony's nobility is cut off by his short-sighted, self-delusion and pettiness.
Beyong the loss of greatness, in this production, they go for farce too frequently, including in the early scenes: Cleopatra's treatment of the messenger when his bad news (Antony's married) has Cleopatra potentially attacking him is played as comedy, not as seeing Cleopatra as feeling this news as a betrayl or loss. Why? this keeps Cleopatra as a joke; not as someone whose passions are so deep. Here she is portrayed as shallow, overall. An actress remembering her glory days of acts, not of a character experiencing depth of feeling. But that too may be a legitimate way to play the text - maybe the lines don't really give her anything other than superficial passions - it's just harder to care about her with such a portrait - it's also harder to believe that all these significant men from Ceasar to Dolabella by the end of the play would fall for her.
Some actions played as comedy seem more problematic than the above scene. In the scene where Antony botches his own suicide, and there he is dying, collapsed on the floor, immobile, because he believes Cleopatra has already killed herself, a messenger from cleopatra comes in, gets down at floor level to say right to antony, and says
"the queen has sent word to you" -
- when?
-now.
Even before Antony asks "when?", the audience cracks up. The interaction is played as comedy. Stewart's Antony also starts to laugh. In an open discussion with the cast after the play, stewart says that this laugh was the assistant director's idea - but that overall they wanted the play to be as human as possible. Others in the cast said that one of the ways they were looking at it was as a kind of celebrity expose, where we see behind the closed doors of the Royals, and this is what we get.
And as for Octavian's performance - it is one note: someone who's really really sincere. and pauses. alot. between words. of a line. to show. just how sincere. he is.
The actor says he wanted to play Octavian as less of a cold calculating fish and more of an emotional character who hero worships his enemy Antony. Not sure where he gets the hero worship, though Octavian certainly seems to parrot many of his actions, but the actor claims that several times Octavian is accused of weeping in the play so he must be a more emotional guy than most have given him credit.
He too plays Octavian literally from the text: for instance, he plays the scene of getting Antony to mary Octavia as if Agripa's "studies" proposal for marriage came as a surprise to Octavian. And if it did, Agripa doesn't even "ahem" and cautiously try to interpose the idea. He just sails into it. But Octavian, as soon as he hears that Antony considers himself free to marry, doesn't evan blanch at the idea. And yet later on, he's played the scene where Octavian bids farewell to Octavia and Antony as if he can't stand to let her go. The two scenes' responses to Octavia seem therefore inconsistant: the one throws away Octavia in marriage to an enemy; the next seems filled with almost incestuous reluctance to let go of her. Surely if that's how he felt, that first scene where the marriage is proposed should show at least some reluctance on his part to make this political bargain, if that's how it's to be played?
The only actor on stage who seems to hear the words he's saying, speak them like they are thoughts or interactions with other characters is Ken Bones' Enobarbus. His description to Agripa et al of Cleopatra's barge is the only moment of embodied poetry in the play. He conveys the sense that despite his Roman cynicism, he is moved by Cleopatra. She is a force for illusion and emotion. Pity the rest of the play lets that portrayal just ring hollow.
But is that what's in the play? Only moments of memory like these, cast against a smallness of Tony, Cleo and Ocky in the Big Brother House, having to perform ridiculous tasks to see who gets voted out first? Or perhaps it's more Survivor, where Sextus Pompei is voted off the island first; last to go are Antony, then Cleopatra and Octavian is the winner. How is that tragedy? Indeed, watching this version of the play felt more akin to watching an episode of the Sopranos: fascinated, occasionally hopeful, but simultaneously repulsed by knowledge of the leads' self-interested insensitivity/rationale of their tangential cruelties.
Joyce Carole Oates starts an interesting piece talking about the Tragedy of Imagination - that unlike in other tragedies where the tragedy comes of the hero having to confront his (ya his) illusions and confront reality, that's something that doesn't happen here. Cleopatra and Antony stick with their version of the world throughout the play. Though not said explicitly, for Oates, the tragedy seems to be the potential loss of poetry that goes out of the world when it loses its two best poets, Antony and Cleopatra. With them goes illusion of "sun drenched Egypt."
I dunno. That used to be sufficient for me to say, yes well, that's the big loss and we're left with Octavian who's so constantly contrived (tho he cries, and rages at Antony's message to him where "he calls me boy!" - oh how the audience laughs at this explosion onto the stage at the start of the scene). But again, the tragedy may be that the world is seen as so polarized: why are the practical poetry-less, and the poets useless at best or harmful at worst? Not a tragedy - an anti-Romance perhaps?
It's interesting that the RSC has put performances of Romeo and Juliet in the main theater against Antony and Cleopatra in the Swan: was the irony deliberate?
As for the production at the RSC, while the cast may have striven for something "more human" it seems they lost communicating something grand. Humanity does not have to be equivalent with vapidity, but that seems to be the case here. The venialness, the superficiality of cleopatra and the lack of awareness/hysteria of Antony make it seem like nothing so grand as poetry is lost when these characters suicide themsleves, rather, that this illusion-driven allowance for self-indulgence and social harm would be better for everyone if it slept with the fishes. And that's as close to tragic catharsis this production achieves.
Post Script
Re-reading the play didn't help get a better sense of the tragic. Indeed, the production could be a fairly straight reading of the text, though it still seems that Cleopatra could have been both more sensual and more politic, and Antony less extreme in his mood swings. But so? While i didn't experience a great tragic loss or catharsis, it was still awesome to see shakespeare live - with great costumes, sets, to hear the words spoken aloud, and at the Swan, which is designed similar to Elizabethan theaters. Jeez, Patrick Stewart paced past me four times as he (and others) used the theater patron's exits and entrances as well as the stage's own doors. Fantastic! A real opportunity to get up close with the play in the real as well as the round.
This play is part of the RSC's complete works year putting on shakespeare's complete plays. If you're anywhere around the UK this year, try to find a way to catch one of the plays.
Posted by mc at July 1, 2006 10:21 PM