Word: octavius
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...level of intensity throughout the play. Bramhall gives every sentence weightiness, makes every speech momentous. It is with energy, not respect, that he controls the conspirators. His antics make Cassius seem calm by comparison. And in a second act where everyone--Bramhall, David Rittenhouse (Antony), Edwin Holstein (Octavius), and Thomas Weisbuch (Cassius)--is playing at fever pitch, where a ghost puts in an appearance, and where the prodigious battle scene takes up fully ten minutes, the play degenerates into a second-rate melodrama. The giggles heard during what should have been the most exciting moments of the second act ought...
John Irving's performance as the romantic Octavius suffers less from a lapse of character than from an excess of it. Irving's Octavius is a bit too snivelling and dense but never really mars the play...
...were not quite so successful. Tony Corbett's Octavius, the heart-broken poet scorned by Ann, is quite weak enough to deserve's Ann's cruel "Ricky-ticky-tavy" nick-name, but hardly deep enough to evoke sympathy. Timothy Mayer's Stryker, the auto mechanic and supposedly the New Man, and Mark Bramhall's Hector, Violet's secret husband, are spoiled by their accents. Mayer is sometimes hard to understand and Bramhall sounds more like a simpleton than the Jack Kennedy he apparently was immitating. Both, however, have enough sense of timing to draw their laughs well...
...tragic "fall" or deterioration. And we do not undergo a catharsis through "pity and fear" by witnessing their death. Nowhere in the play is death regarded as something terrible; we are not sad when Cleopatra takes her life, but rather rejoice in this final triumph she wreaks over Octavius. Both the lovers evince a death-wish; and we can even say that Antony and Cleopatra set up a menage a trois with Death as the third party...
Most of the supporting roles are in admirable hands. John Ragin offers a cleanly acted and crisply spoken Octavius; Morris Carnovsky rounds out resourcefully the sketchily-drawn Lepidus, a V.I.P. who's not V.I.; and Clayton Corzatte is touching as Antony's attendant Eros. Earle Hyman makes deep music of Alexas' lines; and throughout long silences he shows himself the master of what the late Ethel Barrymore called 'perhaps the highest art of an actor--the art of beautiful listening" (he is less effective doubling as the asp-smuggling Clown...