First and last loves

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In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind generalisation, it’s time to get down to specifics in two of the resident company’s early contributions to the festival.

In the Swan there’s a starrily cast Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory Doran, while in the main theatre Nancy Meckler takes on Romeo and Juliet. Doran gives us pretty much heritage Shakespeare, with Meckler updating the battleground of the Montagues and Capulets to an ugly city square that feels more like Sicily than Verona. You don’t have to choose between such different approaches, for Shakespeare offers an infinity of performing possibilities, but you do need to ask just how good each is in its own way.

Doran is a safe pair of hands. No one knows better than he how to use the thrust stage of the Swan. He makes sure the dying Antony is lifted up with ropes to join Cleopatra in her ‘monument’ high above the stage as Shakespeare wanted. Just as you’re wondering how on earth Cleopatra will manage her own death on the bare stage, a gilded throne and flickering  braziers are suddenly sprung from its  bowels. Seated on a gangway near the stage, you can smell the real leather of the Romans’ armour as they rush on and off, though not quite catch the perfumed aura of the Egyptian queen.

She is Harriet Walter, with Patrick Stewart making a hugely welcome return to Stratford as her Antony. On paper it looks like dream casting, and in the case of Stewart it actually is.