We never see the early meetings of Mark Anthony & Cleopatra, nor really hear of the time following as their romance flowers. We join the action at its peak and are witness only to its denouement. Ultimately, the play is a story of decline.
Two declines, in fact. The decline of a republic - Rome, as it becomes imperial under Octavius - and the second triumvirate and of the central relationship. Good! In the cycles of history, eras of decay are always far more interesting than those of construction.
Like any breakdown, the play is complex, fragmented, precisely unpredictable yet frustratingly inevitable. In short, a play about love as it is, a play for grown ups. (Which is not to say, given the choice, one would choose it over the more immediately satisfying idealism of the jail-bait duo in Romeo & Juliet.)
Of course, we know this even before the characters do. There is no narrative tension in A&C - we all know how it will end. We know Mark Anthony is a broken man as soon as we see him. Only he needs to wait until Actium to realise. We know Cleopatra will commit suicide, we know Octavius will seize power, we know Pompey will try to avenge his ill-remembered father, and many in the audience even know every line of verse along the way. The tension comes from elsewhere.
It is inherent in the precarious balance of head and heart for which the characters struggle, and I doubt I am sticking my neck out when I say particularly Cleopatra. And it is here that the Globe production fails, missing the point of the masterpiece.
Writing like this is not a gobbed-out catharsis, it is the exact opposite - it is control.
A novice play-watcher, I do not know if this is an error of actor or director or both, but error it decidedly is. There must be a hundred ways to play Cleopatra, most of them valid, but surely to play her in a perpetual tantrum, as Frances Barber does, is to lose much. It flattens her character. By being always angry, she never is. Whether or not Barber has sufficient self-regard, stage-presence or even the voice to pull off such an effort - which per haps she does not - is not the point. Even if she had succeeded in seeming truly, frighteningly angry, to do so all the time would be to waste the shock that would come with a more sparing deployment. Ultimately, like Pirelli tyres, power is nothing without control.
Another problem with this approach is that putting all her acting eggs into one basket of terminal crossness, when it doesn’t come off, when she goes for power but finds it lacking, her performance at times touches on camp. Frustratingly Barber seems to have settled for getting the laughs when she could be rooting us to the spot. Fine - laughter can be hard to achieve and she does it well. But, though I might know fuck all about putting on a play, I can read - there are so many gimmes in the script that she could have played a colder, calculating, and yes a more interesting Cleopatra and still had the audience in fits. In fact, like the anger, the sparing use of comedy would have made it funnier.
It is sad in a way because at times she shows glimpses of what she can do. Though she gets most applause for her slapstick beating of a messenger and most (male) attention for her feline physicality, the moments of her (so she imagines) raw abandonment with her women at the front of the stage are real highlights. Nevertheless one is still left ruing a missed opportunity. We should watch Cleopatra in a three-hour balancing act, traversing the deep abyss of her raw psyche. Here she may as well be traversing a paddling-pool.
This article concentrates on Cleopatra because she is the star of this show, and not just because she is the star of the script. But Anthony is played adequately, though with less charisma than the role should surely demand. Nicholas Jones plays him more like a befuddled middle-level manager than a “third pillar of the world”. The lack of electricity between the main characters is palpable, though this need not be a total disaster. After all, the regular hyperbolic outpourings of love required by the script certainly lead one to think that this relationship, like most, is little more than a mutual ego-massage - which is not to lessen its necessity or import, we all need it (increasingly!). The embarrassing divorced-dad style kissing would, in this case, work well, as the sort of understandable middle-aged desperation that curls the toes of reluctant onlookers.
I am tired now and want to go to bed, so let us dash through the rest.
And, I am sorry to say, for the rest, nothing less than crucifixion will do. Nail up the producer! Nail him up and burn the poor man’s threadbare, flea-infested, shit-stained casting couch. Enobarbus is a part which, from reading the script at least, might just be the most interesting male character. But not here, nowhere near - undervalued and quiet without being considered. But Enobarabus is as a soft fruit and champagne success compared to the stale Hofmeister and Monster Munch disgrace of the other male leads. Mecenas even made me angry, such was his non-performance. Was the man actually an actor or merely one of the GCSE students enjoying the show and slouching against the stage (and trying to look up Cleopatra’s skirt - no point, lads, trust me)? I don’t know his name but luckily for the lead soldier - i.e. the soldier!!- he was in no danger of having a beer can flung at him, for I was too busy laughing into it. O, rest you easy, my freedom-loving Britons, for thine mighty enemy is being lead apparently by the most insipid slinky-hipped mincer in the entire legion. The man was too busy trying to look mean and glowering while waving his wandy little wrist around to actually scare anyone. And as for Octavius, the soon to be emperor Augustus Caeser, the man who would rule the world, alone and on-high, for the next several decades. Well, yes, he was (quite) young in real life, but surely he didn’t need to look quite so much like the leader of the crappest gang at school. You know the sort: you could expect to see him on the school bus being picked on by boys in the year below. The only followers he had would stay out of the way and pretend to pick leaves out of bushes while the Year 7s kicked the shit out of him. Someone tell the actor that if you play a boy who will be king, you cannot forget the ‘king’ part. Weed!
So, disappointing, but not without merit (though almost entirely hers).
The Vox Polis Globetastic rating for Anthony & Cleopatra is thus: nice tits, but no cigar!