[In the following review, Carnegy offers a mostly favorable assessment of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford-upon-Avon for the Summer-Winter 1999-2000 season, directed by Steven Pimlott. Although Carnegy criticizes Alan Bates, as Antony, for stumbling over many of his lines, he gives high praise to Frances de la Tour's performance as Cleopatra.]

‘Men's judgements,’ as Enobarbus, Antony's sometime friend and shrewdest observer, remarks, ‘are a parcel of their fortunes.’ For Enobarbus, and for Steven Pimlott's new production, Antony's tragedy is his loss of judgement. His ill-fortune is shown as lying more in his stars than in Cleopatra's arms. We see an Antony whose behaviour is driven by ennui, even by what Sartre called nausea. Behold the man of power, the ‘triple pillar of the world’, now grown bored with omnipotence.

Cleopatra is one reason for him to go on living, drink is another. The one sure thing about Alan Bates's Antony is that it's already all up with him, a man who knows he's marked for death and will revel while he may. This is a Dionysus matched against the Pentheus of Guy Henry's coldly calculating Caesar. It's not his dalliance with Cleopatra that antagonises friends but his wanton self-destruction.

What, then, of Antony's relationship with the serpent of old Nile? Shakespeare doesn't show its growth, catching it only at its maturity and tracing its downward curve and the pathos of its valedictory upsurge. Cleopatra has no need of alcohol. Her intoxication is Antony. From first to last in Frances de la Tour's magnificent performance, she doesn't really know him. At the end, she recognises that her vision of a hero whose ‘legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm crested the world … He was as rattling thunder’ may have been no more than a dream. If Alan Bates is substantial enough in his exuberant dissolution, de la Tour's infatuation is instability itself. The drama is of her transformation from ‘the whore of Egypt’, playing infantile games to hold her man, into regal queen who longs to call him ‘husband’.

It's only with the approach of death that, too late, they sober up into a semblance of what they must have been. When Antony rounds on Cleopatra for her navy's desertion, the embers rekindle. But his reproaches are really self-reproaches. Love flames again in his manic jealousy on discovering Cleopatra bent over the hand of Caesar's luckless emissary. As Caesar closes in on the triumvir who's so carelessy redistributing choice morsels of the Empire, Antony's death parodies that of the romantic hero. It's a botched, cowardly suicide, triggered by a blubbering eunuch's false news of Cleopatra's death. All judgment gone, he fails to see that this was the messenger he should have whipped, a jackanapes who gets off with no more than a bystander's boot to his ample gluteus maximus.

Antony, famously, strips off the disgraced ‘sevenfold shield of Ajax’ to meet his end: ‘Unarm, Eros. The long day's task is done …’ Alan Bates manages the ignominious death as best he may, but as elsewhere fumbles too many of his lines into inaudibility. De la Tour's Cleopatra paints her face and robes herself as Egypt's golden queen, rising to greatness through her pain and pride as she prepares to die. She does so a ritual victim, strewing the ground with sand and absolving her attendants by sponging their necks with water. In all this de la Tour gives the performance of a lifetime, with heartrending delivery of the poetry of her ‘immortal longings’.

The visual setting that Steven Pimlott and his designer Yolanda Sonnabend provide is of a rich but finely disciplined theatricality, drawing on Pimlott's experience in opera and Sonnabend's in ballet.

The bare boards of the theatre's new wooden oval, used so successfully in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello, are now closely carpeted in charcoal grey. Three towering glass surfaces, framed like dressing-mirrors, reflect the action back on itself. Behind them, the outlines of an emblematic pyramid and sinuous hieroglyphs eventually lift to herald the chill dawn of Caesar's victorious entry. The transitions between Rome and Egypt are swiftly accomplished by Hugh Vanstone's lighting which knows how to make this exposed stage seem a private prison or a public palace. Sonnabend's penchant for luxuriant invention is focused into costumes which hit off to perfection the contrast between the suave austerity of Caesar's milieu and the oriental pleasures of Cleopatra's court—Antony cockily celebrates his return from Rome by affecting a sumptuous kaffiyeh.

Pimlott's theatrical language borrows from oriental mime. Malcolm Storry's sonorous Enobarbus wills the life out of him by pounding his naked chest. Cleopatra and her maids haul on invisible ropes to bring up the dying Antony who's clearly visible slumped in a chair behind them. Corpses quit the stage on their feet. The one moment that didn't read was when Antony's friend and appointed executioner, the ironically named Eros, seemed not to have turned the sword on himself but to have thrust it into Antony and calmly walked off. Not the right message at that crucial juncture. It will doubtless be corrected. All in all, this is a compelling view of the work and not to be missed.