Putting the Earth on Wheels

By Martha Duffy

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

by William Shakespeare

During a pitching, drunken revel aboard Pompey's ship, an infantry officer watches the rulers of the ancient world reeling around the deck and yearns that the earth were "on wheels." That is very nearly what Director Peter Brook has achieved in his whirling, boisterous version of Shakespeare's long, intractable tragedy, which opened last week in Stratford-upon-Avon. The play is not very often produced: exclusive of intermission, it runs 3% hours and with 42 scenes is as sprawling as a map of the Roman Empire.

"You have been a boggier ever," Antony tells Cleopatra, and the same might be said of this drama. For Brook it is a daring choice, his first production with the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1970, when he made A Midsummer Night's Dream into a clever circus fantasy all his own. Antony and Cleopatra is not so easily transformed. At times the director seems less bent on interpreting the play than providing solutions to its technical problems. If there are more than 40 scenes, then he lets them flow into each other swiftly, with one group of actors finishing a sequence while another is starting a new one elsewhere on the stage. Brook mines all the playwright's caustic, worldly wit. A line from Enobarbus, who tells of seeing Cleopatra "hop 40 paces through the public street," inspires him to make the Queen's court a frolicking, unregal place where games and horseplay abound. With the help of Designer Sally Jacobs' simple set, he reaches boldly for a world that cannot be onstage: the great battles. The foreground is partly enclosed by six long translucent panels; behind them is a deep background, a shadowy terrain full of strife, the comings and goings of soldiers, sailors, messengers and serfs.

What Brook offers is a kaleidoscope of insight and detail; he misses nothing in the play. But there is little space left over for passion or a world well lost for love. Antony (Alan Howard) and Cleopatra (Glenda Jackson) seem too much like old buddies, rather than old and reck less lovers. Jackson brings overflowing energy to the part. Physically she is mesmerizing. Playing the imperious Queen, she uses broad, almost sculptured arm gestures. A moment later she is running like a girl or jumping dervish-like in tight circles. But there are no pauses or silences here, and finally no intimacy with An tony. The characterization, for all its motion, is static.

The men fare better. As Enobarbus, Patrick Stewart conjures up the Queen's burnished barge, and her beauty that age cannot wither, in the tone of a man who is as besotted with Cleopatra as Antony himself. Jonathan Pryce's Octavius Caesar is fascinating for its subtlety: he is a youthful ruler of sensitive and cunning intelligence. Howard fills the role of Antony, which is something like filling the sails of a galleon. His willful ness, his rages, sarcasm, generosity and reluctant self-knowledge are all here. When Antony's defeats are rushing headlong at him, Howard conveys an eerie lightheadedness that sums up a man who has lost the balance of the world.

For Peter Brook, that position is reversed. Despite all the flying action, his is a level, sophisticated reading of the play.

He will not allow passion to tip it into tragedy.

-- Martha Duffy

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