Antony and Cleopatra (review)

Hartford Stage Company's production of Antony and Cleopatra deployed every inch of its vast, newly renovated stage to hold in equipoise the lyric and epic strains of Shakespeare's tragedy. Cinematic lighting, costume and set design that evoked both the timeless and time-bound aspects of the play, and a strong ensemble cast all combined to present the turbulent desire between Kate Mullgrew's Cleopatra and John Douglas Thompson's Antony not as the driving force of history but instead as another thread haplessly caught up in its impersonal, inscrutable web. The final image of the two lovers spooning center stage atop the preternaturally blue channel that symbolized both the Nile and the Mediterranean encapsulated this interpretation. With the other characters encircling them, the lovers lay peacefully at last, not towering legends, neither soldier nor siren, merely two bewildered, passionate human beings who had loved and died. A splash of warmth in the cold, cavernous space, their still bodies, bathed in tints of orange and yellow, the soft folds of Cleopatra's red shawl pooling over her as she lay cradled by Antony's earth-brown form, contrasted with the steel-grey angular, polished surfaces pressing against them.

This portrait was presaged earlier with the staging of 4.3. Antony and Cleopatra lay in the same attitude, collapsed in sleep, having regrouped after the humiliating defeat at Actium. While a spotlight sustained our focus on them, a faint melody wafted through the theatre as lights came up stage right to reveal Antony's men murmuring and interpreting the music as evidence of Hercules's withdrawal. Because the entire world of the play was ever present in the large open space, movement between scenes, and from Egypt (stage right) to Rome (stage left and center), was swift and fluid, effected by shifts in lighting. Several key moments were also juxtaposed to powerful, ironic effect. For much of Antony's sojourn in Rome, we were kept aware of Cleopatra in Egypt. Especially piquant was Antony's marriage to Octavia: he took her hand in the bright light of Rome, while a solitary Cleopatra could be seen languishing in her dimly lit lounge as she awaited his return.

This cinematic staging had a distancing effect upon the audience. As is often noted, the play has the most scene-changes in all of Shakespeare's plays. In a conventionally staged production where a single locale occupies the stage, the scene-changes constantly shift the audience's attention, mimicking the rhythm of the shifting seas, and, perhaps, aligning the audience with the capricious human passion of the lovers as the attention is moved back and forth between Egypt and Rome, seemingly following their whims. This conventional focus on a single scene at a time also encourages more intimacy with the events and emotions of that moment. The audience's emotions are more prone to turbulence as one moment they might feel sympathy with Antony's decision to marry and the next identify with Cleopatra's acute sense of betrayal in the famous messenger scene.

In this production, however, the audience's panoptic perspective, the seamless fluidity of scenes, and the frequent simultaneity of action created a less intimate focus on the lovers' capriciousness; the audience was not jarred by the rhythm created by clearly defined scene shifts. In seeing two moments at once our sympathies were more immediately divided, the result being that they became less intense. The events unfolding before us were given the distance of historical...