Word: cleopatras
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...performance throughout. He nevertheless has some admirable moments--such as the nicely ruminative "There's a great spirit gone" passage; the speech beginning, "O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more and the point when his eyes go dull as he stabs himself following a false report of Cleopatra's death. Still, he does not live up to the bobility (or vestiges of it) ascribed to him by several of the other personages...
...role of Cleopatra has defeated almost all actresses who have essayed it. Among Americans, only Rose Eytinge was in full command of the part in the 19th century. When the play was mounted in 1937, the late John Mason Brown began his review with the celebrated comment, "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra--and sank." In modern times, only Katharine Cornell has been highly acclaimed by both critics and public (in the 1947-48 season), and even she was somewhat over-rated. (British acresses have managed only a little better...
...Cleopatra is the most multi-faceted of Shakespeare's women. Chameleonic and maddeningly inconsistent, she reflects at some point almost every trait and emotion in the book. Women yearn to tackle the part, for it is to an actress what Hamlet is to an actor: the ultimate test...
...riding in an awfully leaky barge. Dorothy Parker once wrote that Katharine Hepburn gave a performance that "runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Miss Jens extends the alphabet perhaps to E, but this just won't do for a role that requires A to Z. Cleopatra is described as a woman of "infinite variety," but Miss Jens approximates this only in her series of what must be nine or ten different--and resplendent--gowns created for her by Jane Greenwood...
...which is one of the most deliciously sly questions in literature, emerges as nothing more than a request for the salt. Actresses and directors are possibly misled by all the scholars who keep trying to increase the "four great tragedies" by one. We are not gripped by Antony and Cleopatra as we are by Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Lear; we remain relatively detached. In fact, there is enough satire in Antony to make it possible to stage the work as Shavian high comedy...