Tinarie van Wyk Loots (Cleopatra) and Andre Weideman (Antony)
Clinton Brown (an eunuch) Tinarie van Wyk Loots (Cleopatra) Andre Weideman (Antony)
Maynardville’s beautiful outdoor venue – a picnic followed by what is on a balance a perfectly acceptable production, although it doesn’t quite achieve what the director appears to have desired, makes this worth the excursion.
As Barrack Obama seems fatefully bent to prove, we can no longer it seems believe in heroic leaders. The best we can do these days is sigh with resignation that someone not sinister or at best less competent is (for a while at least) not the figurehead of our world or country. It is with this in mind that Marthinus Basson’s production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra strikes one as a thoroughly modern reading of the play. The eponymous couple and their rival are more ruinously self-centred and less ennobled than ever.
His mellifluous voice lends dignity, but André Weideman’s Antony is otherwise a slouching and frequently boorish soldier; Tinarie van Wyk Loots’s brattish Cleopatra pretends at any rate to be enthralled by him pawing her; while Andrew Laubscher’s petulant Octavius Caesar overplays the hissy-fits and undercuts Shakespeare’s carefully laid antithesis of rule by the mind and not the passions. Despite his shrillness, his Caesar is at times quaintly menacing.
Instead, the supporting cast, particularly Lionel Newton as Enobarbus (one should also mention for her solid performance Juliet Jenkin as Charmain) takes the foreground. It is not quite what we have come to expect from a Marthinus Basson production, but then Basson has uncharacteristically chosen to abandon high concept, and “to explore the spaces between the fault-lines of the epic sweep and drama”. This is one of Shakespeare’s more difficult works. Its past success has usually been in playing up its Hollywood values.
The risky downside is that the play cannot be entirely freed from its melodrama and with it our preconditioned expectations, unless the cast can give studied character portrayals and the director aim for intimacy. Newton comes closest, but overall the performances, although competent, are too middling. Yet there are moments when the production more than rises to the challenge: for instance a radical reinterpretation of Act 3 Scene 6, having Caesar show heartless cruelty to his sister. Here Basson’s modern reading and his staging comes together brilliantly.
Basson has neat choreographic ideas, and the set with upright red lightsticks for Rome and golden rays for Egypt is effective. Neat too is the introduction of live snakes, handled by a soothsayer with an accent as slippery, and mesmerizing the audience. The young ensemble have grown facial hair, and this helps them with their soldierly appearance. Basson also has fun with costumes; Cleopatra’s ceremonial dress makes her resemble a large golden insect; her war helmet transforms her into some macrocephalic alien from Star Trek.
Go see.
