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VPSTART • CROW

Editor James Andreas

Clemson University

Founding Editor William Bennett

The University of Tennessee at Martin

Associate Editors Michael Cohen

Murray State University Herbert Coursen

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Charles Frey

The University of Washington Marjorie Garber

Harvard University Walter Haden

The University of Tennessee at Martin Chris Hassel

Vanderbilt University Maurice Hunt

Baylor University Richard Levin

The University of California, Davis John McDaniel

Middle Tennessee State University Peter Pauls

The University of Winnipeg Jeanne Roberts

American University

Business Manager Charlotte Holt

Clemson University

Production Editors Tharon Howard and Christopher Lohr

Clemson University

Editorial Assistants Martha Andreas, Joey Hall, Judy Payne, and Pearl Parker

Copyright 1998 Clemson University

All Rights Reserved

Vol. XVIII

Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile

The 1998 Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Antony and Cleopatra

by Craig Barrow

While a production of The Taming of the Shrew set in the 1950's and a nineteenth century Measure for Measure were entertaining, the most significant Shakespeare production of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998 was Antony and Cleopatra. Surpris­ingly, the 1998 performances of the play were the first attempted by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in its more than twenty-five year history.

Kent Thompson, the play's director, sees Antony and Cleopatra in his "Director's Notes" as the "terrible, mortal struggle between love and power (which in politics always seems to combine duty and ambition)." 1 This conflict seems more clear-cut than it actually is, however, for when A. C. Bradley perceptively says that "the passion that ruins Antony also exalts him,"2 he alerts us to a contradiction running through the play in that the audience is led to criticize and praise Antony and sometimes Cleopatra for the love that is both their weakness and the virtue that conse­crates them in the eyes of the world. Antony may dawdle when he should fight; he may let Cleopatra persuade him to fight by sea rather than by land at Actium when he has an advantage on land, and he may attempt suicide, thinking falsely that Cleopatra is dead; however, since he is sacrificing self in the name of love, his love gains stature while he loses his share of the world.

Thompson seems to feel uneasy about the apparent contradic­tion between the deeds of Cleopatra and Antony and their leap to immortality as lovers at the play's end. Antony, when his legacy of Roman values blocks his love, recognizes his, as Thompson says, "cowardly, unprincipled, or treasonous" actions, while Cleopatra "betrays herself, her country, and Antony throughout the play."3 Seemingly puzzled by what Shakespeare has done, Thompson declares, "It's an astonishing and daring piece of stagecraft-showing the all too human weaknesses of the central characters but changing our perceptions of them at the last moment." 4

Frank Kermode, in his introduction to Antony and Cleopatra in The Riverside Shakespeare, also explores the contradiction noted by Bradley, and comes to this creaky conclusion: "Under the pressure of historical necessity Voluptas must lose, whether represented by Cleopatra or Falstaff, but the defeat is not the easy and obvious

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matter of a morality play."5 Kermode then goes on to explore the poetry, the themes and images of Shakespeare's text, as many do to resolve the contradiction. For Kermode, the identifications of Antony with Osiris and Cleopatra with Isis privilege the love that is the wrong choice in the world and the right one out of it. This seems to be a fairly common move in dealing with Shakespeare's play, in which the action seems to have one objective and the figurative language another. Janet Adelman finds the values of Cleopatra as lover and mother of Antony a source for Antony's bounty, his positive value in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare's Plays. 6 Charles Whitney sees the figurative strain in notions of festive ambivalence in a recent article in The Upstart Crow.7 Perhaps the most insightful handling of the lyric values of Antony and Cleopatra, however, appears in an essay by Arnold Stein, who has this to say about the lyric and tragic modes within the play:

It [the lyric order] is indifferent to fact; but in tragedy, which is no self-contained lyric world, the lyric is not exempt from the force of fact, and must pay the price for its rightness of feeling. What we finally approve in our tragic wisdom may not be the rightness of the feeling, perhaps not even the imaginative rightness; but the right-proved and paid for, however reluctantly-of a man to feel what he feels. When we are reduced by tragedy to the basic question, we have passed righteous­ness (most easily), and rightness. We are left only with the right, and the question. What is man? The tragic wins over the lyric; but it is benevolent and tolerant­lessons learned from the familiar imagination of human defeat. It does not repeal the lyric, or scorn it, but allows its voice to be heard even in the final chorus, and to make its mingled claim in the memory of the listener.8

With such contradictions in the play itself, it is not surprising that Antony and Cleopatra is sometimes known as a reader's play.

As in any Alabama Shakespeare Festival production, much is handled well. The thematic juxtaposition of place is highlighted by colors, blue for Rome and green for Antony's forces; music, trumpets for Rome and sounds of the sea for Egypt and Cleopatra; and stage symbols, such as the portcullis for Rome, as if it were prison. Most of the roles were capably handled. Harry Carnahan was a cool, political Caesar, and Greg Thornton was terrific as comic, insightful, but ultimately a tragic Enobarbus.

My problem with the production was with Greta Lambert as Cleopatra and John Woodson as Mark Antony; I never believed in

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their attraction for each other, let alone their love. Woodson is a capable actor, but he is not a romantic leading man. I think the production would have been much improved if Greg Thornton had played Antony and John Woodson, Enobarbus. Thornton can be a leading man, has been in many Alabama Shakespeare Festival productions, and Woodson is more than capable of playing the role of Enobarbus; he is a talented character actor. Both Woodson and Greta Lambert were more effective when they were not on stage together, when Antony was with other men, or when Cleopatra was with Charmian and Iras. Lambert was probably best in her most important scenes following the death of Antony; she showed why she is the best actress of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Seldom does one ever see a casting problem in an Alabama Shakespeare Festival production; this was one.

The costuming was generally effective, although harem costumes early on for Cleopatra, Iras, and Charmian diminish Cleopatra's significance rather than heighten it. An elevator used to hoist the dying body of Antony nearly bucked Cleopatra off of it at one point in the action, another gripe. Admittedly, Antony and Cleopatra is a difficult play to produce, but I think the Alabama Shakespeare Festival could have done a better job.

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Notes

1Kent Thompson, "Director's Notes," The Cast List, ed. W. Todd Humphrey (Montgomery: Alabama Shakespeare Festival, 1998), p. 7.

2A. C. Bradley, Shakespeare Tragedy (New York: World Publishing, 1955), p. 74. 3Thompson, p. 6. 4Thompson, p. 6. 5Frank Kermode, "Antony and Cleopatra," The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.

Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1345. 6J a net Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's

Plays (New York: Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1992), pp. 94-95. 7Charles Whitney, "Charmian's Laughter: Women, Gypsies, and Festive Am­

bivalence in Antony and Cleopatra," The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, 14 (1994), 67-88.

8Arnold Stein, "The Image of Antony: Lyric and Tragic Imagination," Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, eds. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 575.

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John Woodson as Anton y and Lester Purry as Eros in the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Production of

Antony and Cleopatra, summer, 1998.

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Gre ta Lamber t as Cleopatra and John Woodson as Antony in the Alabama Shakespeare Festiva l's Production of

Antony and Cleopatra, summer, 1998.

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