Word: cleopatras
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Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra has frequently been called a "problem play." The characters do not fit into familiar Shakespearean molds, and the play itself refuses to be classified as a simple history, tragedy or romance. An excellent cast under the masterful direction of Timothy Foley '98 has capitalized on Antony and Cleopatra's uniqueness, foregone Shakespearean stereotypes and assimilated a production that is not at all problematic...
Posters for the production advertise it as "a new vision," one which will shock those familiar with the play's often lush productions. Foley's Antony and Cleopatra's is set in the Victorian Age, and Cleopatra's Egypt is a drab bedroom furnished only with a frumpy wooden four-poster bed. Instead of flowing and exotic garments, Cleopatra and her two dowdy maidservants wear corsets and stiff, dull-colored Victorian dresses with high collars...
...vision and all, however, the story is still the same. Those who call it a romance say it focuses on the passionate love affair between Antony (Noah Feinstein '98) and Cleopatra (Erin Billings '00); people who think it a tragedy dwell on Antony's fatal flaw; and historians remember it for the end battle of Actium, which marks the end of the Hellenistic Age and beginning of the Roman Empire. As Foley's interpretation sees it, however, Antony and Cleopatra follows Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra and a long line of her betrayals: first, when she aligns herself with Caesar...
...characters in the play are, as critics have stated, difficult to capture; they are inherently slippery. Billings' flighty and fidgety Cleopatra, the play's only recongnizable character, is marvelously coquettish; Cleopatra--an Egyptian Scarlett O'Hara--is as equally lovable as she is despicable. She seductively coos to Antony in one instant, while in the next scene she drives a messenger to his knees with a gun to his head after he delivers bad news...
...three most dramatically com- pelling figures--Titus, Tamora and Tamora's lover, Aaron the Moor (Uche Amaechi '99)--Sherrod, as the vengeful Tamora, is the most successful. Exuding an air of darkly brooding, smouldering bitterness mingled with a strangely tragic Cleopatra-like dignity, she somehow makes one feel she's as much sinned against as sinner...