[In the following review of Michael Attenborough's 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Antony and Cleopatra, Fleming finds fault with the production's slow start and muddled enunciation of verse, but contends that the strong female performances, particularly Sinead Cusack's fine Cleopatra, saved the production.]

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra feels a moment of panic as the curtain first rises and they remember the play's potential length, its episodic structure, its closely packed style, and the fact that its premiss is an orientalist fantasy that pits a luxurious, feminized East against an austere and triumphant Rome. (It is an odd fact that theatre companies now carefully anxious in their staging of Othello are still prepared to represent Shakespeare's Egypt as little more than a beauty parlour. Shakespeare's own description of Egypt is drawn from Plutarch, who, as a Roman historian, was interested in the creation of a barbaric and politically ephemeral Orient; but these are surely times to resist, rather than celebrate, such visions.) The opening of Michael Attenborough's new production—red lighting, psychedelic music, hookah pipe, Antony discovered on a couch receiving a massage—is scarcely reassuring. However, the production is well directed and intelligently cut, and picks up speed after the first act. The set—two leather couches beneath a vast, slowly disintegrating map—is elegant and efficacious, and makes clear, as nothing else in the play or this production of it does, that its action concerns the subjugation of the Near East. The movement of the actors is dynamic and well-choreographed (with the signal exception of a toe-curling “Alexandrian” reel, into which cast members fling themselves with only too much enthusiasm). Costumes (slinky and gorgeous for the Egyptians, with ill-hanging togarized surcoats for the Romans), lighting (red or cold white), and music (moody flutes and drums versus martial trumpeting) firmly underline the incommensurability of East and West—and Antony's fatal position between them—for those who may not be able to gather as much from the dialogue.

Which is just as well. For it is a striking fact about a theatre company whose stated mission is “to create outstanding theatre relevant to our times through the work of Shakespeare” that less than half the cast can speak his words so as to capture and communicate their meaning, let alone their beauty. Although the language of Antony and Cleopatra is difficult, accenting Shakespeare's line is presumably what RSC actors train to do. But audiences will be baffled, and should be shocked, by much of what they are expected to listen to in this production: for with the honourable exceptions of Simon Nagra (Alexas), Stephen Campbell-More (an excellent, ambitious, priggish Octavius Caesar) and Trevor Martin (the truly sinister soothsayer), the male members of the cast repeatedly misstress, shout, or otherwise bungle their lines. Clive Wood as Enobarbus manages a good rendition of the barge speech (with an odd stress on the word “divers”), but his obvious ability is elsewhere marred by his adoption of the de rigueur swagger that connotes the Renaissance soldier on the modern stage. Some of the shouting may be explained—as it usually is—by the difficulty of making oneself heard from the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but it has to be said that the women in the cast rise far better to the challenge. Sarah Ball makes a surprising amount of her role as Octavia, here a woman both dignified and warm, whose uncomfortable position as counter between husband and brother is compellingly drawn; Noma Dumezweni is strong and extremely beautiful as Charmian, the woman who loves and stands up to Cleopatra; Kirsten Parker is a light and able Iras—and all three understand both what they are saying and how to say it.

Parker and Dumezweni are doubtless helped by, as they in turn help, Sinead Cusack's performance as Cleopatra, which is as good as they come. Cusack's Cleopatra is consistently changeable: self-mocking, forgiving of Antony, and knowing herself in need of forgiveness, she is lithe, regal and unhysterical. She, too, raises her voice, especially in the first act, but as she warms to the part, she has a range of registers—humorous, dignified, sexy, compassionate—at her command. And, under her influence, Stuart Wilson's Antony is rendered more compelling than is quite accountable. For, whether dismissing Roman messengers, feeling the prick of conscience, or romancing Cleopatra, Stuart shouts his lines. He pants, moves stiffly and looks faintly pathetic in his costume. And yet, in the later acts, his Antony still has the power to attach the audience, and make it understand what it means to love a woman—a fallible one at that—more than life itself. The success of Michael Attenborough's production is thus the triumph of Shakespeare's play, more or less ably realized.