Word: cleopatras
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Kitten on the Sphinx. On the first of the two nights, audiences saw a Cleopatra who was a mere frisking kitten with claws...
Caesar is the central thing in Caesar and Cleopatra, the central thing for Cleopatra herself. The musing middle-aged stranger she addresses, between the paws of the Sphinx, as "Old gentleman," keeps her his doting pupil in queenship, but will not risk his heart. A Roman eagle Caesar is, but like the eagle, bald, and wearing a laurel wreath as a toupee. He is in any case beyond wearing laurel wreaths for show; he knows too well that the only true conqueror is the conqueror worm. Caesar is that type that always fascinated Shaw, the successful man of action...
...roughly a philosophy of Right Needs Might, but the philosophy is not, with him, a pretext for dictatorship. Shaw's Caesar, if not history's, has no other course for checking the violence, the will-to-rule, the lust-to-kill of everybody-the young Cleopatra not least-he encounters. Indeed, the exultantly upraised swords and the hysterical shouts of "Hail Caesar" at the final curtain are less Caesar's moment of triumph than of defeat. The voice of reason is always drowned out, all too soon will "Ave, Caesar" become "Et tu, Brute...
...Caesar as stooped, weary, elderly-an excellent piece of acting, but a doubtful interpretation. For (what surely Shaw never intended) Olivier's Caesar is a man past being tempted by a minx, rather than one who declines the gambit for fear of being hurt. Vivien Leigh's Cleopatra is a willful, naughty, coaxing, charming child, more fully characterized than Lilli Palmer's perfect cuddling kitten, but almost as much enfant terrible as budding jemme fatale...
...angelic wings, but seven-league boots are needed for this panoramic drama of conquests and civil wars that is even more a chronicle of power than it is of passion. The characters are uniformly worldlings, plotters, palter-ers, betrayers; even Antony is destroyed by lust, not love; and Cleopatra is as devious as she is passionate. Antony and Cleopatra is really less the sequel of Caesar and Cleopatra than of Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar. And in this checkered struggle for domination, it is not wisdom that triumphs in the end (Caesar lies bleeding in the Capitol), nor idealism...