Antony and Cleopatra (review)

The early publicity for Dominic Dromgoole's production of Antony and Cleopatra promised that it "would employ Jacobean staging, clothing, and music." While it kept the promise about clothing and music, the stage at Shakespeare's Globe was significantly reconfigured for the production. Three steps, designed to look like marble, extended from the center of the balcony and led to a platform that would serve, for example, as the location of Antony and Octavia's single scene together (3.4), as Caesar's vantage point during the first battle (he exited up the stairs when Sacrius said "I never saw an action of such shame"), and as Cleopatra's monument. The structure was supported by four pillars, two at the rear on either side of the entrance to the inner stage and two at the front of the platform. The canopy created by the stairs and the platform covered a raised, circular playing space where, for example, Antony (in 4.2) spoke to his household servants on his last gaudy night and later attempted suicide. The entire structure thus created a smaller stage on the main stage.

While the production for the most part offered a more or less traditional reading of the play, the banquet scene on Pompey's ship cast a less familiar light on Antony and Caesar. While Antony remained sober, amusing himself with the drunken Lepidus through his description of the crocodile, Caesar, here a child of the time rather than its possessor, collapsed on the stage soon after he entered and had to be propped up against one of the pillars. Later, as Menas asked Pompey to let him cut the cable, Caesar stood unsteadily to their left, struggling unsuccessfully to button his tunic, oblivious to the conversation nearby. The actors danced around a table at the center of the circular space beneath the small canopy until one by one they fell onto the stage, leaving only Antony standing. When Caesar stood up again, Antony embraced him with playful roughness at center stage. But, for the rest of the production, Caesar possessed the time and became the cold, calculating politician he is usually understood to be. The next scene (3.1), in which Ventidius, in triumph, cautions Silius against acquiring "too high a fame," was cut.

The production chose to highlight the comedy of the play both in the way lines were spoken and in the way they were played. The exchange between Antony and Enobarbus at the death of Fulvia (1.2) and between Caesar and Antony about who should sit first, through the tone and pace of the lines, both drew laughter from the audience. Antony's suicide (4.14) became a comic routine, the death of Bottom the Weaver in Pyramus and Thisbe. When he saw Eros dead, Antony looked puzzled, not entirely sure what had happened, what he saw. Then, with a sword in his hand, he seemed not quite capable of figuring out how to kill himself. Standing on the circular playing space under the small canopy, he held the sword against the right front pillar, the point out toward him, and he appeared to be looking for an effective angle from which to approach it or measuring the distance he would have to go to reach it. As he finally moved toward it, he stumbled onto the point, only to discover he had not succeeded in killing himself after all. ("How? Not dead? Not...