Carry on up the Nile

Antony and Cleopatra
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 28 August

In this deplorable new production, it is not just the great general Antony who’s taken leave of his senses but Michael Boyd, its director and generalissimo of the RSC, too. In prospect, the casting of the diminutive character actor Kathryn Hunter as the serpent and seductress of Old Nile always seemed weird, if not actually crazy. In practice, it is an unmitigated disaster. It is doubtless some kind of record that Hunter is playing both the Fool in Lear and Cleopatra in the same season. But this is a foolishness too far, and it does not stop there.

Hunter is an accomplished director and an actor of prodigious, protean skills. Her wiry physique and rubbery face have permitted astonishing assumptions (Richard III, Lear, Kafka’s Monkey), but Cleopatra was never going to be one of them. In daring to essay this summit among Shakespearean female roles, which indeed can be played in a great many ways, Hunter proves there’s actually a limit to its ‘infinite variety’. Lacking any semblance of a possible physique du rôle, she stumbles around the stage on the absurdly high heels without which she might just about come up to Antony’s waist. The couturiers have done their best for her with a succession of sensational gowns, echoed outrageously in the outfits for her entourage. But also their worst in doing nothing to conceal the bony shoulders and sinewy arms whose jerky movements are an essence of Hunter’s acting. The staring eyes, dropping jaw and furrowed brows do not help, while her coarsely unmusical voice and rapid-fire delivery do not begin to do justice to the obvious intelligence that lies behind her understanding of the wondrous poetry.

What kind of an Antony could have fallen for her? Darrell D’Silva is a commendably rough-grained Kent in the RSC’s concurrent Lear, but as Antony is plainly at a loss, as anyone would be, in being paired with such a mistress.