Antony & Cleopatra 2009

March 26th - 2nd May 2009

Alun Raglan as Antony and Lucy Black as Cleopatra.  (Photo: Graham Burke)

Director's Note

   In Julius Caesar Shakespeare imagined a classical Rome through the lens of late Elizabethan anxieties and enthusiasms. In our own production, we chose to shift the focus forward a little, setting the action in the costume of the 1640s in an England on the verge of civil war. Shakespeare’s Rome seemed to us to be as English as that, and the play extraordinarily ominous of the conflict, and regicide, to come.
   In Antony & Cleopatra Shakespeare revisits and develops his Rome, but sets it against a new imagining – Egypt. This is not as might be recorded by an archaeologist or a historian. It is neither North African, nor Middle-Eastern. Cleopatra is its Queen and head of state, but it is a state that requires no apparent administration or control and has little presence outside the confines of her remarkably informal and feminine court. It is hardly a physical place at all, more an optional condition of the human spirit and male imagination – a place that, above all, is not Rome; private, not public; an empire of infinite wishes and desires, not one of subject lands patrolled by armies of Roman policemen.
   But in other tragedies of love – in Romeo & Juliet or Troilus & Cressida – the discreet, private world is overwhelmed and destroyed by a public world which has hardly registered the former’s fragile existence. Here Antony and Cleopatra’s private passion assumes a public profile and scale that threatens the integrity of Rome’s world, making its destruction not incidental, but necessary.

She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
John Donne

Cast

Mardian & Octavia Dani McCallum
Canidius & Dolabella Marc Geoffrey
Scarus Clive Hayward
Mark Antony Alun Raglan
Cleopatra Lucy Black
Philotus Dan Winter
1st Messenger Richard Jones
Charmian Catherine McKinnon
Alexas Paul Currier
Soothsayer Jonathan Nibbs
Iras Nadia Giscir
2nd Messenger David Kelly
Enobarbus Simon Armstrong
Octavius Caesar Byron Mondahl
Lepidus & Dercetus Paul Brendan
Maecenas & Clown Paul Nicholson
Agrippa Chris Bianchi
Pompey & Eros Tom Sherman
Menas & Thidias Alan Coveney


Production

Director Andrew Hilton
Associate Director Dominic Power
Assistant Director Kate Lamb
Set & Costume Designer Harriet de Winton
Costume Supervisor Rosalind Marshall
Lighting Designer Tim Streader
Sound Designer & Composer Elizabeth Purnell
Choreographer Jonathan Howell
Production Photographer Graham Burke
Musicians Will Slater (oud & bouzouki)
Paul Harris (trumpets)

Production Manager Joanna Cuthbert
Stage Manager Jayne Byrom
Deputy Stage Manager Eleanor Dixon
Assistant Stage Manager Fiona Jane Coombe
Stage Management Trainee Kate Mander
Carpenter Martin Moyes
Costume Maintenance Miri Birch
Costume Assistant Sophie Borton
Costume Laundry Kim Winter

Lucy Black and Alun Raglan as the title roles, by Graham Burke

Lucy Black as Cleopatra, Alun Raglan as Antony. Photo: Graham Burke

Reviews

The Times
7th April 2009
* * * *
Black is Queen of all she surveys
  For Julius Caesar, the first production of this year’s two-play Shakespeare season here, the actors wore the Jacobean costumes belonging to the time in which the play was written. In the sequel we have moved forward a generation, to the eve of the English Civil War, and if Octavian Caesar, the eventual victor, is not a total Roundhead he is at least more soberly dressed than his intoxicated rival, Antony. The furnishings are aptly minimal for a play constantly on the move around the Med — hard seats indicating Roman sobriety contrasting with the comfortably stuffed chairs in Egypt. The dresses worn by Cleopatra and her ladies are diaphonous and exquisite.
  Lucy Black’s performance as the Queen is, in a word, superb. In another word: charismatic. Not only does she revel in the outbursts, but she shows Cleopatra revelling in them, pretended rage segueing into real rage and out again. She paces, arms akimbo, snarls, grins and flutters her hands in a dismissive gesture showing herself to be too self-absorbed for ordinary niceties. She is wholly the woman who has long known absolute power. In her speaking of the lines her voice is clear, emphatic and tonally varied. Who could fail to be enchanted by her?
  What is curious is that she finds the production’s Antony enchanting. Alun Raglan conveys nobility in his moments of defeat, aghast at the emptiness of his future. He does not say, like Othello, his occupation’s gone, but his suddenly hollowed face shows this. The Antony of this play is a soldier sapped of will and, though I don’t know how an actor sets about suggesting a glamour that has gone, it is a quality that Raglan truly recovers only when Fate turns against him.
  Andrew Hilton’s justly acclaimed Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory is a company ten years old and, as always, his expertise in casting animates the fleeting roles of messenger, soldier, soothsayer and the like. Among the more complex roles we have a grimly disillusioned Enobarbus from Simon Armstrong, watching Antony’s every error with gathering dismay and, in his famous description of Cleopatra’s barge, keeping the gathered soldiery in thrall. Byron Mondahl’s steely-eyed Octavius develops the assurance evident in the earlier play into a fascinating portrait of unswerving and ruthless will, affected only for a moment by his adversary’s death. Total power is his aim and finally he has it. Jeremy Kingston

The Observer
 5th April 2009
  Theatre in Bristol is at a turning point. For the worst part of two years the Bristol Old Vic has been dark. Now comes the cheering news that Tom Morris, who has helped to reinvigorate the National under Hytner, has been appointed artistic director. Let’s hope he forges an alliance with Andrew Hilton, who has kept the Bristol banner flying at the wonderful Tobacco Factory, with Shakespeare productions which both swell and whisper, which are full of stars but free of celebrities.
   His Antony and Cleopatra is no exception. Stripped of faux-Egyptian baloney - there’s not a batting eyelash or clanking necklace in sight - it has in Lucy Black a Cleopatra who is fierce enough to win The Apprentice, or murder her sister, and yet is full of a settled sadness. You can almost hear the power leaking out of Alun Raglan’s bell-voiced, once-commanding Antony, while Byron Mondahl’s Caesar pads watchfully around, anxious and waspish. The smallest things are telling. As Enobarbus, Simon Armstrong, having resolved to leave his master, shrinks slightly from his unsuspecting embrace. The pearl that Antony gives his queen is made into a ring, which glints on her finger throughout the couple’s defeats and victories, a token of their history. Charmian and Iris, giggling best friends in Stuart silks (the costumes are inherited from Julius Caesar but don’t distract) watch every move of the lovers, magnifying each gesture with their reactions. Susannah Clapp

The Mail on Sunday
19th April 2009
* * * *
  A tiny space, little money, no stars. At first glance, Bristol’s Tobacco Factory couldn’t have less going for it. And yet - while the well-funded, beautiful Old Vic down the road languishes, hopefully to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes later this year - this theatre goes from strength to strength, a beacon in the theatrical gloom that is South-West England.
  Actually, the teeny in-the-round stage is a big advantage for Andrew Hilton’s revival of Antony & Cleopatra. Instead of the operatic spectacle and scenic excess that can often swamp Shakespeare’s last and greatest love-tragedy, here we find speed, intimacy and directness. The smallest details reveal the bigger picture: Cleopatra, bereft when her beloved Antony puts work before pleasure, forever fiddles with the huge pearl ring he sent her; Antony’s half-ponytail, laced in gold ribbon, not at all Roman nor military, marks him as a slave to Egyptian sensuality ...
  Clear storytelling and precise and penetrating characterisation is what counts here. Black’s diminutive Cleopatra is girlish, impulsive, emotionally extreme; not beautiful but beguiling. It’s her energy that has knocked Alun Raglan’s Antony for six and drained him of his once legendary fight. Indeed, there’s little left of the brash warrior in this Antony. Raglan, who in his haste swallows too many words, has an edge of melancholy that suggests he is all too aware that he’s lost the bigger plot and can’t help himself.
  And when the lovers are together, usually kissing and wrapped up in one another’s arms, they create their own world in which nothing else - not losing empires nor making fools of themselves - matters.
  A wonderful play very well done. Georgina Brown

The Guardian
7th April 2009
* * * *
  This bold production begins with the powerful lovers saucily enveloped, his legs wrapped around her. The Egyptian court is imagined as feminine and hedonistic, all flowing robes and easy, barefoot physicality. Alun Raglan’s bare-chested Antony, his hair scraped back into an unkempt pigtail, and dressed in what could be fancy yoga-wear, looks set for a beach party in Goa. Cleopatra, thrillingly played by Lucy Black, has her eyes intently trained on him. It is, ever so simply, very sexy.
  You think back to this moment of sensual liberty throughout Andrew Hilton’s production, as political ambition, empire-building and the ravages of war trample on the possibility of establishing a personal bond between Rome and Egypt. As always, Hilton’s strength lies in making an advantage of limited funds (80% of the funding here comes from box-office takings) to produce a stripped-back work that confidently confronts us with the power of Shakespeare’s verse. The staging is minimal, the costumes unobtrusive, and the lighting dims as the hope of love, and peace, fades.
  With his fine ensemble cast, Hilton keeps the audience rapt for three and a half hours. It’s not perfect - Raglan’s delivery could be clearer - but it is absolutely compelling. The lovers’ last scene together echoes the first, but this time her legs hug his bloody, dying form, reminding us of the journey they, and we, have taken. It was messy and doomed, and yet, like this production, spirited and irresistible. Elisabeth Mahoney

The Daily Telegraph
13th Apr 2009
* * * *
  In Bristol, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory is celebrating its 10th anniversary in style, with a compelling revival of Antony and Cleopatra that reminds us how director Andrew Hilton has succeeded in putting this out-of-the-way spot on the map.  He has gathered a first-rate ensemble, led by Lucy Black’s husky, mercurial and wholly mesmerising Cleopatra and Alun Raglan’s martial, broodingly intense Mark Antony. The no-frills evening moves along with vigour, intelligence and clarity.  Warmly recommended. Dominic Cavendish