The production has potential, despite it being Sex and the City star Cattrall’s first major role in Shakespeare. Rating: * * *
By Charles Spencer
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Back in 1973, at the susceptible age of 18, I saw my first Antony and Cleopatra with Janet Suzman starring as the queen of old Nile. She knocked me for six and her Cleopatra still glows in my memory as one of the greatest Shakespeare performances I have ever witnessed.
Now Suzman is directing the play herself, with Kim Cattrall, so fondly remembered for her performance as the sensual Samantha in Sex and the City, tackling this most demanding of roles.
Cattrall isn’t in the Suzman class yet. Especially in the first half, her lack of Shakespearean experience shows. This is her first major role in Shakespeare and Cleopatra is a hell of a place to start.
She often misses the pulse of the verse, and she has a tendency to shout stridently. But in her elegant gowns and with her hair dyed black she is a splendidly alluring queen, even when she puts on reading glasses in a production that stylishly combines ancient and modern. And if she is not yet the mistress of Cleopatra’s infinite variety, she grows in stature throughout the performance and in the great last act becomes extraordinarily moving.
Right from the start she captures Cleopatra’s wit, especially in her dealings with her handmaidens, Charmian and Iras. But there is a disappointing lack of sexual spark in her relationship with Jeffery Kissoon’s battered Antony, an old campaigner who has run to seed and is first discovered snoring loudly in a drunken stupor at Cleopatra’s feet.
I’m not asking for the frantic bouts of simulated oral sex that notoriously accompanied one RSC production, but it would be a much stronger evening if there was a sense of the addictive passion that has turned Antony, one of the three most powerful men in the world, into “a strumpet’s fool”.
But if the first half sometimes seems alarmingly tepid, the production really catches fire after the interval.
Kissoon is deeply moving as he bids farewell to his troops for the last time, and seems to penetrate the very heart of grief and shame when he realises that Cleopatra has led him to defeat yet again. His bungled attempt at suicide is both comic and unbearably sad — which is exactly as it should be.
Cattrall, too, begins to scale the dramatic heights as she mourns his loss and transforms a vainglorious old roué into a god in perhaps the most transcendentally beautiful verse Shakespeare ever wrote. I suspect her shaky start was due largely to first-night nerves and the performance will become richer and deeper as the run progresses. Among the supporting cast in Suzman’s production, spectacularly and atmospherically designed by Peter McKintosh on a split-level set, there is especially strong work from Martin Hutson as a priggish, unexpectedly comical Octavius Caesar and Ian Hogg as a cynical but finally touching Enobarbus.
This isn’t a great Antony and Cleopatra yet but it has the potential to become one if Cattrall works on the verse and Kissoon responds more ardently to her charms.
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