Antony and Cleopatra (29 page)

8. “Simply by their being middle-aged”: Patrick Stewart as Antony and Harriet Walter as Cleopatra in Gregory Doran’s 2006 production. The warmth and maturity of their love is revealed in their shared sense of humor.

And does our sympathy for them depend on a rather chilly reading of the “boy Caesar,” not to mention poor Octavia
?

Noble:
No, I don’t think so at all. I’m rather fascinated by Caesar and I hope I wasn’t particularly “chilly” about him. I think Shakespeare understood him, although of course Shakespeare was a great romantic and so the romance wins out. I think the love Antony and Cleopatra have for each other and the power of that love sometimes makes us pity them, but ultimately we do admire them. They have done such extraordinary things. Antony could squander his talents—he has so many! He can throw them down on the road for people to tread on, he has so many talents! He decides, “I’m not going to fight any more, I want to be with this woman,” and Shakespeare enables us to find huge sympathy for that.

Octavius is interesting because he is the guy who [when he became the Emperor Augustus] created Rome as we know it, as we think of it. The person who mapped out contemporary civilization. He was an absolute genius. Octavius, Napoleon, Alexander. There are two or three people in history who virtually single-handedly created a vision that lays down a blueprint for future generations, and Octavius was one of those people. That’s partly in Shakespeare and partly in history, but Shakespeare would have known that because he was a very well-read man. So there’s sympathy that lies with Octavius. He’s trying to do something extraordinary and unique, trying to create Pax Romana, trying to create the great civilization, trying to transform Greek ideas with practical, sustainable military and political solutions. And Antony was messing it up! That’s what I mean about how you have to come at it from each different point of view; we must feel the frustration that Octavius must feel, and we must feel the annoyance that Antony feels about Rome. So the play becomes a real three-legged stool rather than a two-legged stool with a wonky side where the third character is.

Murray:
I think that the play must, to a certain extent, be concerned with the opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. It is in one sense reminiscent of Euripides’
The Bacchae
. What Shakespeare says in the play which makes it so extraordinary at the end is that love is more important than anything else and it transcends death. Caesar is in the play because he is the leader of the most efficient war machine man had ever known at that time, probably the most efficient ever. In order to be that leader you have to be what Antony presumably once was: ruthless, unemotional, stoic. All those things which we require of our leaders in battle. Therefore, compared with the humanizing of Antony and the erotic love charge of the play, he is going to appear unsympathetic. There’s no question about it. But you should find someone who in himself is entirely honorable—he is doing the job that he was born to do and he’s doing it well.

Doran:
I think Shakespeare tests our sympathy for them, as he often does with the great characters. Just at the point where you’re feeling most sympathy for them, he makes them do something outrageous which challenges your patience and your ability to tolerate them.
Cleopatra, of course, does that all the time, which is what makes her so delightful. I think John Hopkins’ success in the part of Octavius was to show him as not just chilly, but as loving Mark Antony, and being disappointed in him because he had been a role model for him. The extremity of his own reaction when Dercetus, hoping to gain some advantage, brings him the news of Antony’s death shocks Octavius. I think that’s a very potent moment. As always with Shakespeare’s characters, he is a rounded personality, but I do think that he has different priorities: Octavius’ priority is the Roman Empire; Antony’s priority is Cleopatra; and Cleopatra’s priority is, I suspect, Egypt. We found Octavius equally as passionate as Antony, but passionate about politics and beauty rather than sex.

Octavia is a very moving character because of the simplicity of her faith in her new husband. I think Antony does try and love her, but the competition proves too great. So she is a victim of the progress of this materialist relationship, but I think we do continue to tolerate them when they do these outrageous and stupid things. Antony’s insane idea that he could challenge Octavius to single combat is, as we all know, completely ridiculous, but somehow the fact that Antony believes he could do that makes us love him for his human folly.

What do you think is the role of Enobarbus
?

Noble:
He’s a professional. He is the person who has dedicated his life to a particular man; actually, to an army and to one general in particular. We see a very particular vision through his eyes. He has several quite practical functions. One is that he supplies the most grounded, down-to-earth presence in the Egyptian court,
but
he sees Cleopatra’s virtues and her brilliance in a more vivid way than anybody else, therefore it gains an authenticity that it couldn’t possibly have otherwise. He becomes the best witness because he’s not in her pay; he’s a soldier, he’s a pro, he’s been everywhere. The second is that he, in one way, embodies the great Roman loyalties: loyalty to the state, loyalty to the general, loyalty to the regiment. When he betrays Antony, therefore, it’s a measure both of Antony’s tragedy
on the one hand, but also a measure of the passion, the depth of love Enobarbus feels for Antony, because he dies seemingly of a broken heart. He’s a very functional character while at the same time being a very vivid character.

9. “The depth of love Enobarbus feels for Antony”: Bob Peck as Enobarbus and Michael Gambon as Antony in Adrian Noble’s 1982 production.

Murray:
It’s a wonderful part. It’s extraordinary. He is clearly torn between two things. One, he is a soldier and he has been faithful to Antony—and Antony has been a wonderful soldier—and now he has to see his master cracking up. He has to consider whether he can honorably continue to follow this man who is doing the one thing that he, as a Roman soldier, cannot possibly stomach—he is leading to the disintegration of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, he is in love with Antony and he is in love with Cleopatra. There’s no question that he loves Cleopatra. The famous speech, “The barge she sat in. …,” must be one of the greatest love speeches ever delivered. He is besotted with her. So he is torn in two, and he encapsulates the dilemma I spoke of earlier—the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. When he finally goes over to Caesar his heart breaks, because he has betrayed his love. It’s a wonderful part.

Doran:
Enobarbus charts Antony’s decline. He, like us, in a way, is tested; he allows us to rejoice at the other Romans’ outrage at Antony’s behavior, but then finds himself tested to his limit. He really stays beyond the time when he is able to sustain his role as the right-hand man to Antony. When he leaves Mark Antony and goes over to Octavius’ side you realize that his love for Antony is so great that he cannot survive without him, without his love. The scale of his love for Antony allows us also to love Antony. In a way his is perhaps greater than Cleopatra’s love for Antony. That is what is so moving about him. Enobarbus dies in a ditch of a broken heart; Cleopatra dies in a politically motivated suicide which is staged in such a way that allows her great myth to continue. He’s a character that Shakespeare invented and he’s a wonderful Chorus in the play who allows us a shift in perspective.

Charmian’s a great part, too, isn’t she
?

Noble:
Again, she is both the Egyptian confidante and the Chorus. Egyptian confidante in the sense that she allows expression to all of Cleopatra’s many, many colors and tantrums and all of her vivid personality. She’s the camera through which we can see. She’s the person who allows us to see and hear things we otherwise wouldn’t know had happened. But there is a choral quality, which comes in an extraordinary way in the language in the death scene at the end. Just look through that last section at the use of vowels; it’s very, very interesting. Endless, huge, open, liquid vowels, and Charmian’s right in there as part of that great Chorus of pain and loss; that’s part of her function. Like a Greek Chorus she both expresses the grief and is also witness. The eyes of the Greek Chorus are permanently open; they have to see the pain of Oedipus. They are the camera through which we see the tragedy of Oedipus—she is the multifaceted camera through which we see part of the tragedy of Cleopatra. It’s a fascinating part.

Murray:
I think they’re both marvelous parts. I had a wonderful actress, Sarah Paul. Like Josette, she is also a black actress, and we did manage to get a very foreign court, very “un-English,” very “un-European,”
which was very important. Her sacrifice, the crucial part she plays in the fifth act, when Cleopatra suddenly thinks, “Oh my god, she’s going to get to Antony before me, she’s braver than me, she’s showing me what to do,” is a sublime moment.

Doran:
Charmian is very frequently, at least in Stratford, the understudy Cleopatra. Again, she’s a great part because she’s the loyal one. Even Iras isn’t told the full details of what happened in the monument. She’s a fantastic character because she’s so witty, so rude, and so passionate. That’s why we love her. Both Charmian and Enobarbus do more than support the great characters of Antony and Cleopatra; they also enhance those roles because of their passion for their master and mistress.

But on the other hand, a lot of the other Roman soldiers might seem a bit indistinguishable from one another: did you and your cast find ways of individualizing them
?

Noble:
One tries to. Basically, you have to cast the best actors you possibly can. I had cracking good actors, a marvelous cast, but you just have to get as good a bunch as you possibly can.

Murray:
Well, we tried jolly hard! I had a very good cast. We talked about their position and their relationship to what was happening in the action, what their subtext was, so that they weren’t simply standing round the stage like dummies, there was something in them for the audience. Again, this is one of the great things about being in the round: your audience may be checking the content of the scene not from the faces of the protagonists in the scene, but from the characters who are watching and experiencing the story. We worked very hard on that and I like to think that it worked.

Doran:
One of the jobs you have to do as a director when you have something like forty-four speaking roles is to work out what the doubling is going to be. I tended to keep Romans as Romans and Egyptians as Egyptians, and then tied it through from their function in the play. You can double in a way that doubles the function of a character, so, for instance, various different characters who are loyal can
be played by the same actor, sometimes in the same costume, but with a different name. Or different skeptical characters, like Ventidius and Philo, can be doubled together.

The other thing is good casting; to make sure the actors themselves bring something to those roles. There is always something interesting to find. Dolabella, for example, or Thidias, are fascinating characters. John Barton once said to me that great actors in the great roles will look after themselves to some extent; it is the job of the director to look after the small characters, to define who they are and what their role in the play is. Part of the job of direction is to ensure that the actors playing those smaller, myriad number of parts have a real investment in what the whole play is doing. So even the man playing Pacorus, which is the smallest part in Shakespeare, the dead body of King Orodes’ son, has his role in the scheme of the play.

Real asp or toy
?

Doran:
We went for real. We auditioned various snakes and decided on a milk snake. This created a lot of issues that we had to work through. We discovered that the actress playing Charmian, although she kept very quiet about it, had a terrible fear of snakes, so we had to tackle that head-on. We then discovered that you have to feed snakes at particular times of the day, so that by the time the snake is onstage at half past ten it has fully digested its meal, otherwise when you pick it up from its basket of asps it can defecate all over Cleopatra! What it did, however, in terms of the performance, was make the actors realize how important it was. When we did
Macbeth
I rehearsed the dagger scene with real daggers and real blood for one rehearsal. And using the real snake made that scene a great deal more tense, especially in the Swan Theatre where people are very close to the stage. There was a fridge at the stage door where we kept the snake’s food, which was frozen packs of little naked baby mice. The actors also used this fridge for their lunches, so there was a degree of resistance to this snake!