Antony & Cleopatra
Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Simon Godwin Olivier, National Theatre, Southbank, London SE1 (nationaltheatre.org.uk). Until 19 January 2019; NT Live broadcast: 6 December Running time: 3hrs 30mins (including interval)
The National Theatre has really gone to town on this “ultrastylish” production of Antony & Cleopatra, said Ann Treneman in The Times. The costumes are lavish: “double-breasted suit glory” or full military fig for the men; “simply fabulous mode” for the women. The set is both “intricate and immense”. In Egypt, we get glimmering pools and archways, while in Italy, the war command room is a marble palace with a vast screen split into battle scenes. There are amazing set pieces, such as a “rip-roaring” drunken party on board a huge steel battleship. It’s spectacular glamorous, stuff – and “the whole endeavour shines”. But ultimately it is the couple at its heart that makes this tricky play live or die – and both Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo are “simply terrific”.
I have never heard these two characters’ needs and desires “expressed with more potency” than here in this pair’s “remarkably spontaneous verse-speaking”, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Director Simon Godwin has pulled off a “penetrating and considered account” of a complex, twisty play. But the fact that it comes across with such “walloping emotional immediacy” is thanks to the “blazing star power” of the leads. Fiennes gives us every aspect of Antony, said Michael Billington in The Guardian: the born soldier, the dreaming sensualist, the “wry piss-taker”. But he’s at his best in charting Antony’s tragic decline, “magnificently” capturing his shame and desolation after the battle of Actium.
Even so, a good Antony is “doomed to play second fiddle” to an equally good Cleopatra, said Harriet Fitch Little in the FT. And Okonedo is more than good – “she’s great”. She “casts emotions on and off like so many sparkling costume changes”, and manages to twist Cleopatra’s famous histrionics “into subtle shapes that make sense both when she’s being very funny, and later very sad”. Among the supporting performances, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph, Tim Mcmullan and Katy Stephens are excellent as Enobarbus and Agrippa. It’s a long evening, admittedly, but definitely a “rewarding” one.