Antony and Cleopatra (review)

Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. 24 July 1999.

The all-male casting of Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London asked a contemporary audience to acknowledge and accept the Elizabethan stage convention of men playing women's roles. Could we forget that the Cleopatra we watched was a man? Not completely. Did that matter? Not really, although it overtly emphasized the humor in the play, which perhaps was Shakespeare's intent all along when he wrote this tragicomic role for a boy. Director Giles Block's 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra cut only ten lines from this epic. It opened after Mark Rylance directed its companion piece, Julius Caesar, in the season's repertory with the first all-male cast at this Globe.

In this production Rylance, artistic director of the Globe and a well-seasoned Shakespearean actor, became the first man to play Cleopatra on London's professional stage in nearly 400 years. He follows a parade of famous females, some nearly as immortal as the role itself. At thirty-nine (his age and Cleopatra's in the play), Rylance's girlish cavorting revealed the grasping of a consummate actress who knows she's beyond her prime. It was a captivating performance. Rylance's Cleopatra was a skipping coquette who roved across her stage, tossing her head of black curls and jangling her gold bracelets. Eager to help her lover in battle, she earnestly strode about in a helmet and breastplate, inciting the audience to titter. The impression was of a child playing dress-up. Cleopatra's bravado was pure shtick in her hilarious abuse of her messenger, played as a trembling geezer by Roger Gartland. For one entrance, Cleopatra wobbled onstage wearing four-inch-platform chopines to ask of her rival Octavia, "Is she as tall as me?" (3.3.11). When Cleopatra received the news that Antony's new wife was low-voiced, it was the irony of Rylance's own tenor that sparked amusement.

Several lines in this production evoked a more gender-constructed meaning than usual, such as Cleopatra's, "and I have nothing / Of woman in me" (5.2.237-38). Yet the famous utterance about her impending fate, "and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I'th' posture of a whore" (5.2.218b-20a), was anticlimactic in Rylance's opening night delivery. He trilled "squeaking Cleopatra" in a falsetto, with "boy" almost under his breath as invective. In successive performances, he experimented with better renditions of the line.

Rylance's animated performance avoided going completely over the top, but it sometimes teetered when he worked for laughs. "O happy horse!" (1.5.22a), this Cleopatra sighed rapturously about the animal Antony rode when he was absent from her bed. A camp edge was inevitable, although Rylance's performance generally resisted it and the gender-bending never felt uncomfortable or offensive. He did not try to be a woman, but only to portray one with verve. This, I admit, sounds like a drag queen, but Rylance's Cleopatra was more than that. He played an emotional range striving for "infinite variety." Still, I was reminded that a drag show occasionally hovered close to the surface, especially in scenes between Rylance and the burly Danny Sapani as Charmian. While James Gillan as Iras would have convinced me he was a woman had I not known otherwise, the tall, slim Toby Cockerell as Octavia towered over Ben Walden as her cocky "big" brother, Octavius Caesar.

The "ruffian" Roman lover seems a difficult mark to hit in the presence of a powerful Cleopatra. Paul Shelley's Antony was too genial, a washed-up warrior who ironically resembled Kris Kristofferson in the film remake of A Star is Born. After his loss in the ill-advised sea battle of farcical offstage shouting and sound effects, Shelley's Antony showed his anger tinged with a pathetic, desperate edge. And in a supposedly world-famous love...