Antony And Cleopatra
Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
***

Although not sumptuously staged as an epic theatrical spectacular that swings between the infirm glory of ancient Egypt and imperial Rome, Gregory Doran's new production of Antony And Cleopatra makes you see the drama of its dangerously smitten lovers in a fresh and fascinating light.

Doran plays up the intimate relations of the Egyptian queen and the Roman general, but plays down the worldly scenes of diplomatic and literal warfare so that the couple's private lives and emotions come to seem more important than their struggle to cling to power.

In Doran's staging you would be hardpressed to perceive any serious difference between a decadent Egypt and the sober, dutiful Roman world as Shakespeare conceived them. Instead Antony And Cleopatra becomes a play about the process of a selfdestructive love affair of two leaders in the last flush of middle-age.

On the relatively small-scale Swan stage, with Stephen Brimson Lewis's set merely an abstract, map-like backcloth, queen and general seem to become interestingly isolated from each other. They have the reasonably hot air of lovers about them, but lovers who guess they may be burned in the heat of it all.

Antony in Patrick Stewart's remarkable performance speaks a helpless and despairing commentary on his decline and fall from ageing, distracted general to the status of enthralled playmate for a queen. I cannot remember seeing an Antony so deep in melancholia or self-disgust.

The first glimpse of him, gallivanting absurdly in what looks like a white dress and short shirt as he chases after Cleopatra, perfectly justifies the contemptuous reference to "this dotage of our general's". Most actors playing Antony look as if they have plenty of

life and fight in them. Stewart, jovial and lightly mocking though he may be, is different. After James Hayes's stolid Lepidus has fallen by the wayside, after John Hopkins's unusual, emotional Octavius Caesar has fallen out with Antony and the triumvirate of rulers has been rent asunder, Stewart's Antony begins to behave as if he knows himself doomed in the political and military power game.

Harriet Walter's skittish Cleopatra, attired in virginal white and a wig that harks back to Biba in 1968, speaking in that throaty, throttled voice of hers, has more than a trace of a haughty, temperamental captain of a girls' public
school about her. She remains insecure about the chances of holding on to her older man.

This may sound disparaging. It is not intended to be. The attractive Walter, in common with many leading English actresses, is ill-suited to roles that call for blatant voluptuousness and sexual provocation. Her dryly comic, ironic Cleopatra may stint on passion but captures the queen's blazing theatricality, vulnerability and joie de vivre.

Doran manages the lovers' stoic suicides with a spectacular élan, elsewhere absent. Stewart's Antony is hauled up to the high monument like some wounded, groaning animal while Walter's fragile Cleopatra, arrayed in gold upon a throne that shoots into view from beneath the stage is swathed in deathly calm.

Those who are primarily caught up in Antony and Cleopatra's love affair and fatal politicking - Peter de Jersey's buoyantly swaggering Pompey, Ken Bones's semi-detached, rueful Enobarbus and Julian Bleach's chillingly amusing Clown - necessarily remain shadowy figures. For this is an Antony And Cleopatra where Patrick Stewart steals, holds and possesses the main, Shakespearean picture.