Word: cleopatras
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PETER SELLARS has stroked a bold production of Antony and Cleopatra in the ghostly waters of Adams House Pool, with frigid temperatures and floating death cooling the flames of Shakespeare's most passionate tragedy. Not that it isn't lively--Sellars sustains the initial gimmick with scene after scene of slapstick splashing and general mayhem, but balances his off-the-wall antics with a sound sense of the appropriate; invention almost seems subordinate to the text. If it frequently resembles a circus, it is an indisputably Shakespearean circus, the Bard doing breast-stroke, the actors barnstorming with the kind...
First the pool, with the audience distributed in a horsehoe around it: at one end floats Cleopatra's sturdy raft; at the other, the diving board extends over the water like an erect phallus. Don't laugh--that's the intention. The board clearly conveys the perils of Antony's passion; the longer it gets, the more wobbly and precarious the position--man at his tallest and most triumphantly masculine, may in a second topple into the waves and be lost forever. All we miss is the Esther Williams schtick; what we get is Antony and Cleopatra shouting at each...
...CENTER of this production, perhaps at the very center of nature herself, is Jenny Cornuelle's Cleopatra. Clearly the actress relishes this magnificent role; just as clearly she is worthy of it. The actress has a commanding presence, a voice of infinite shading and variety, a range of expression scarcely paralleled in this college theater. She can break character in high style, or sweep through the audience so that bodies part and heads turn. Her poetic eulogy to the fallen Antony is a cry of meaning to the gods; it is breathtaking...
Pity that "drainage problems" in the pool kept these actors out of their Nile last week--and this production from being reviewed while it was still running. Business was great, even without posters, even without reviews, and it was free. This Antony and Cleopatra can make no claims to greatness; the people who put it together had something less on their minds, and something more: a vigorous, probing, playful approach to college theater. You've missed the show; you'll hear from them again...
...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...