Antony and Cleopatra
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon ***
This Antony and Cleopatra is certainly better than the National's recent effort, which barged down the Nile and sank. But Steven Pimlott's Stratford revival is a mixed salad, largely because neither Alan Bates nor Frances de la Tour quite matches expectations.
Pimlott's production has a lot going for it. For a start, Yolanda Sonnabend has designed a beguiling space that effortlessly contains both Rome and Alexandria: three tilted mirrors in the foreground, an elliptical astrolabe in the background.
It both implies the characters' narcissism and Shakespeare's cosmic range and allows the action to move fluently. Even the leather bikers' kit for the Romans and fluid silks for the Egyptians, possess a timeless charm.
Two fine performances also dominate the evening. One is Malcolm Storry's amazing Enobarbus. Instead of the usual, trusty, old sweat, he is a clear-sighted chorus who foresees the tragedy yet is powerless to prevent it.
Storry, who one day should play Antony, has a voice that cuts through rhetoric like a razor through stubble. Asked by Cleopatra what is to be done after the rout at Actium, he replies: "Think, and die," with merciless accuracy. Devoted to a master whose faults he is helpless to rectify, Storry makes Enobarbus the emotional focus of the play
Guy Henry is equally remarkable as Octavius Caesar. Slightly deaf in one ear, like great-uncle Julius, he is a consummate mix of vanity, hypocrisy and cool calculation. Nothing is more revealing than his chuckle at Cleopatra's attempt to conceal half her wealth: falsity, for Octavius, is a condition of public life.
The play, however, is called Antony and Cleopatra and it is here that Pimlott's production falls short. He certainly suggests the protagonists' mutual passion: our first sight of Antony is of his going down on Cleopatra. But, expert as Bates's Antony might be at cunnilingus, he is not a cunning linguist.
His basic problem is that he is short-breathed. He chops the lines up into fragments, investing them with a wealth of irony - a technique that works better for Simon Gray than Shakespeare.
Bates plays Antony as a grizzled ruffian with a big heart. He even shows compassion to the discarded Octavia. But he tends to play the emotion behind the words rather than the words themselves. A classic case is "call to me all my sad captains" which he swallows instead of finding the melancholy music in each short syllable.
With Frances de la Tour's Cleopatra, the problem is more one of physical restlessness. One can see what she is after: to show that Cleopatra is volatile, mercurial, histrionic. She even does a self-mocking hip-wiggle on "serpent of old Nile".
What she misses, until the last act, is the contained majesty that underlies the quixotic playfulness. Only at the close, where she appears shockingly shorn of make-up and then slowly assumes the accoutrements of grandeur, does she acquire a regal stillness.
The end result is a mixed affair: a production that moves fast, looks good and seeks to offer, in the words of Janet Adelman, "a tragic experience embedded in a comic structure".
However, while Pimlott conveys Shakespeare's endlessly shifting perspective, his central pair lack that mysterious quality called weight: the power here lies on the periphery.
