Word: brooking
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What's black and white and red all over? If you're a member of the Cambridge City Council, you'd most likely say it is the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's (MBTA) plans to extend the Red Line through Harvard Square to Alewife Brook Parkway...
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...
...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...
...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...
...Peter Brook, that position is reversed. Despite all the flying action, his is a level, sophisticated reading of the play...