Word: cleopatras
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Whether played at the summit by grand masters or at the Y.M.C.A. by nine-year-olds, the game of chess offers both intricacy and infinite variety. As did Shakespeare's Cleopatra, it leaves hungry where most it satisfies. It has been calculated that if every man, woman and child in the world were to spend every waking hour playing at the superhuman rate of a game a minute, it would take 217 billion years to exhaust all the variations on the first ten moves. Chess is an endless labyrinth that can both mesmerize and anesthetize. Alone, perhaps, among the games...
...rate, Cleopatra's life should be fun; she must relish what she does in her anti-Roman freewheeling. She positively enjoys her self-inflicted death: and we are not saddened by it, but rather rejoice with her in thus outwitting Octavius. Miss Jens, however, traverses the play with little more than sober determination...
...role cries out for someone with the versatility, verve, sensuality, humor, and bearing of black actress Diana Sands. Which raises another point: although she is often described as pure Greek, the historical Cleopatra was actually of racially mixed ancestry and would today be classified as Negro. The opening speech of Shakespeare's play calls her "tawny," and she even refers to herself as "black...
Robin Wagner has well captured the contrast between stern Rome and luxuriant Egypt in his sets; especially striking are the warm golds that adorn Alexandria, and the 15-foot-high double columns that support Cleopatra's monument--all skillfully lit by Marc Weiss. John Morris's music is markedly better than what he provided for Caesar, though it is still a bit obvious in its quasi-exotic effects...
Despite all the things wrong with this Antony and Cleopatra it was worth doing--particularly as a companion piece to Julius Caesar and as a vehicle for Philip Kerr's Octavius, which we are not likely ever to see excelled...