[In the following excerpted review of Sean Mathias's 1998 National Theatre production of Antony and Cleopatra, Kellaway suggests that Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren are not credible as lovers. She characterizes Mirren's Cleopatra as both capricious and scheming, and disparages Rickman's Antony as understated and tight-lipped.]

At the beginning of Sean Mathias's production of Antony and Cleopatra it seems we are witnessing the morning after a golden night before. Antony (Alan Rickman) has an exhausted look and his voice hasn't woken up properly; it is as though his very character were crushed linen. Cleopatra (Helen Mirren) is also languid, displaying herself on a bank of carpet-covered bolsters amid resting soldiers and beautiful girls—accessories to her majesty.

Playing either Antony or Cleopatra must be like trying to fill larger-than-life gold goblets to the brim. It is essential that the actors cast in these roles are innately regal because they are going to need their personal charisma before they have even said a word. It may have seemed a safe bet casting Rickman and Mirren—but it turns out that the bet was much too safe. Rickman and Mirren at no point seem as dangerous as they should, nor do they ever convince me that they loved each other.

It is a plausible, though reductive, reading of the play to say that two such egos could never really love each other, that Antony and Cleopatra are too like each other for love and always meet as if there were a mirror between them. And in this production there is a sense that they can't ever touch each other truly; there is absence when they are together. It's an interpretation that disables tragedy.

Helen Mirren's Cleopatra is capricious, selfish, theatrical. She snaps in and out of moods like a spoilt child, and to comic effect. She is excellent when most waspish and satirical, asking Antony: “Can Fulvia die?” And there are moments when her voice sings to magical effect, when she seems like a sun worshipper, with Antony her sun. When their weather changes and she has to woo Antony back (he is sure she has betrayed him), she says, “From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,” and the effect is extraordinary. There is a sense that these are the only words that would have any chance of prevailing over Antony—and she, inspired, has found them.

But the vain, selfish woman with butterfly moods is only part of Cleopatra. Somehow her faults have to be contained within a perfect, shining carapace. She must be frighteningly seductive, her mood-swings unpredictable and in no way comic. Mirren's Cleopatra is at her best when relating to messengers—her mean games come into their own. It is impossible to imagine this Cleopatra sitting in her burnished throne of a barge without fidgeting; she would be up to some game or other, disturbing the water with her vanity. And, finally, this Cleopatra's attempt to win back Antony's love by pronouncing herself dead seems nothing more than a disgraceful lie, the act of an unintelligent flirt.

Alan Rickman's performance is a disappointment because it is so consistently understated. The indolent authority and the reclining voice are fine at first, but towards the end of the play, Antony speaks as though he has never properly recovered from his earlier chest wound: his voice has become a pained, breathy monotone. You know that there is something wrong when comely, restrained Octavia (Katia Caballero) seems to have more presence than her husband and when Caesar appears the possessor of a gravitas Antony can't equal. This Antony is more cad than hero, all too laconically willing to take Octavia on as his wife as a sexually politic gesture.

Casting Finbar Lynch as Enobarbus is more interesting. He looks like a gold lizard in his armour. His head is shaven and he wears a single chunky silver earring. He is not a straightforwardly noble soldier. He is hedonistic and slightly menacing. And while it seems unlikely that such a man could ever have dreamed up the poetry he produces, Lynch replaces lyricism with the danger and sexual tension that is missing elsewhere.

Tim Hatley's set is a world cut in two and cratered, a nifty semi-circle that can do all sorts of clever things, revolve and split and sprout windows and doors. But I did not find it aesthetically pleasing (though the carpets serve their turn nicely). And many of the costumes are a disaster. In particular, it is a mistake to put Helen Mirren in a blue breastplate which makes her look like a pantomime fish. The cage of candles at the end resembles a gone-wrong altar piece, and there is no one there to worship.