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Excerpts from the
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WEEK 1 - DAY 1 - Monday 12 January 1987
A mean day of icy roads, sub-zero temperatures. Almost fifty people assemble round a vast conference table on the fourth floor of the
National Theatre -actors, stage management, designers, David Aukin, the NT's Executive Director, Ann Robinson from Casting,
the production's publicist, Nicki Frei, and its director, Peter Hall, dark-suited, smiling and deeply preoccupied. Beneath the greetings,
anecdotes and laughter is the tension of having soon to
show one's hand.
At 10.30 the director makes a start, setting Antony and Cleopatra against its world-embracing canvas. Since the colour and tone is
Renaissance, designer Alison Chitty wants to create a sixteenth-century view of the classical world -'with not a bare knee or snake
headdress in sight'. Referring to the lush language of the play: the actors should learn
to handle the verse correctly. 'If you approach it psychologically, it will get up and hit you!' warns Hall.
Everyone listens closely: it is Hall who created the Royal Shakespeare Company, who, with his colleagues, revolutionized the approach to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He hands over to his
actors for a first reading.
Anthony Hopkins, grey-bearded for King Lear, and Judi Dench, with her cap of blonde hair, are strikingly matched in physical type.
Both wear glasses. When they start to speak, their voices are similarly warm and husky, his Welsh-accented, hers with a distinctive and appealing break to it.
At lunchtime Hall has an NT meeting. Based on his decision of several months before (to leave the National when his contract
expires in September 1988), the media the next day reveal that the Board and he have chosen Richard Eyre to succeed him as director of ,
the NT .
WEEK 3 - Wednesday 28 January
Judi Dench first worked with Hall in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford, in 1962. She is very feminine, small neat hands covered
with rings, and rehearsing, warm, open, sometimes deeply pensive. With that plangent, unique voice it would be easy to move listeners
with an inflection, but no effect is cheaply achieved, there is effort and intelligence behind everything she does. I try hard to see the
seam between technical skill and emotion dredged up from the gut - and can't. She is also briskly funny: after a photo session for a
newspaper interview, for example, 'What they wanted was me on a chaise with an asp. What they got was a cross face in a leather coat.'
Rebutting the concern Dench had expressed about the age of Cleopatra (38 to her own 52), what comes across is radiance,
vulnerability, and movement that is quick, light and youthful.
WEEK 7 - Friday 27 February
The morning of the snake auditions. A slow-worm and a black racer have been brought in, to be tried out as Cleopatra's asps. Everyone
crowds round as Dench and Miranda Foster (Charmian) learn how to handle them. The racer is decided upon. The slow-worm goes very
quiet. Murmurs gentle Ernie Hall, chief stage manager: 'Well, wouldn't you, if you'd just lost a job?' I wonder at this sudden call for
naturalism in an emblematic production.
Act I Scene I. The play opens: Demetrius (Brian Spink) and Philo
(Mike Hayward), Roman emissaries to the court of Alexandria, make an energetic entrance through the doors, followed soon after by
Cleopatra and Antony, Charmian and Iras, who circle the stage. Hall: 'Should the eunuchs be backing before them, fanning?' Alan
Cohen: 'Petals being strewn. ..?' Judi Dench: 'It's as if they're behaving very badly in public, shoddily.' Hall: 'It's all jokes and
wine and staying up all night.' Hopkins: 'Why and where are they progressing?' Hall: 'To or from a meal, as though you're going
off to your private chambers. Weave an Eastern, joyous, sexy spell upon the space. ' (He indicates the shape on a floor-plan pinned up on the
wall.) 'What binds Antony and Cleopatra is over-riding lust. I don't mean that they don't like each other, but she's never the same for five
minutes, changeable, quixotic, difficult. They have constant conflicts. He's a bit of a masochist.'
So images, ambiance and attitudes rapidly accrue: in order to find the logic for what happens onstage, the actors must create a sense of
life beyond the visible arena. Everything vibrates round that central relationship. Before Antony and Cleopatra enter, the text prepares
us for 'a gypsy' and 'a strumpet's fool'; the opening procession provides them with a superbly theatrical opportunity to display that
lust of which Hall spoke and to establish an Egyptian court suffused with it. (He quotes the remark of a Victorian who saw the play: 'How
unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!')
Judi Dench, of Cleopatra: 'She's desolate, restless - that's how you
get in the East when your fella's away. ... All I've had is one airmail letter and an orient pearl!' Later, after Charmian has teased
Cleopatra about her past love for Julius Caesar: 'She turns everything
to her advantage. ...One minute Charmian and Iras feel secure enough to be quite cheeky, the next
- pow! -she's slapping them round the room. She's quite capable of "unpeopling Egypt" of
killing one of her own followers, of killing herself. ...'
... Tony Hopkins has become increasingly depressed about learning his
lines, trying to struggle through rehearsals with prompting, sometimes giving up and returning to his script. (At one point Judi Dench
takes his hands in sympathy: 'It's agony, isn't it? Getting through that great wad of words that first time without the book. ...') Hall
persuades him to take a few days off until he feels confident about the lines: the cast respond with quick understanding.
(Blaming himself for the problem, Hopkins might well have derived comfort from some remarks I only came across once the
production had opened: 'I had great difficulty, for the first time, in learning the lines, partly because it's chopped up, short sentences,
short phrases' -Michael Redgrave on his own portrayal of Antony in 1953.)
Act IV Scene 15. The monument is set up: Judi Dench cautiously
climbs the staircase on wheels, clutching the rail. During blocking, they had talked about the logistics and general
shape of this scene up to Antony's death. Now they go into more detail, breaking it up: Cleopatra is in a strangely pessimistic mood
which her women have never seen before. Her language gives hints of impending death and the majesty to which she will rise. When
Antony is carried in, her first instinct is self-preservation; not for anything will she risk coming down to him. (Dench: 'And later,
when he asks for wine and wants to talk, she says "Oh no, let me speak".') 'Why does she mention Octavia now?' asks Hall.
Dench: 'She's obsessed by her. Octavia is "the other woman".'
After Antony is hauled up we get a refrain of their relationship as it used to
be - the joy, the wine, the love, their supremacy. Twice, in his death throes, Antony says,
'I am dying, Egypt, dying'. Hall points out that, in modern terms, one 'dies of love' ; in camp
Elizabethan jargon, to die was to have an orgasm. This scene, then, is also the final consummation of their passion.
... There is nothing sentimental or neurotic about Judi Dench: all of a
piece, her approach to the large emotions is non-reverential, almost domestic. (Why do I remember her automatically gathering up
everyone's dishes after lunch in the canteen?) Access to even the darkest moments in the play is controlled by brisk wit, a burrowing
intelligence and a practical reactive streak.
... Judi Dench had been delighted to discover that when Antony
returned to Rome, Cleopatra was carrying twins, born just before his marriage to Octavia. She felt it put everything into perspective.
Certainly the words in their parting scene assumed a new loading - 'The sides of nature/Will not sustain it', 'What says the married
woman' and even 'Cut my lace, Charmian'.
Peter Hall smiles enigmatically: 'It's not in Shakespeare.' He has a resistance to extraneous information which might give implications
to the text which the writer had not intended. When, after weekends, he talks of having done 'a lot of homework', he means he had dug
further into Antony and Cleopatra itself or re-read Julius Caesar, North's Plutarch translation or Granville Barker. I understand this
resistance as far as Cleopatra's pregnancy is concerned - Shakespeare would have referred to so significant a circumstance
if he had wanted it included in our thinking - but in general I am puzzled by it.
... From quite early on, Judi Dench has happily anticipated that no two
performances with Antony Hopkins will be alike. He revels in taking different paths to the same conclusion, and makes full use of
rehearsals to experiment with this. In one run-through he starts off relaxed, too relaxed, a wine glass always to hand, even sucking a
sweet whilst politicking with Caesar. Although the charm and confidence work well in the optimistic first section of the play, they
run him into trouble later. He has not released sufficient of Antony's grandeur and command, for his fall from power over half the world to
seem momentous. It is a question of giving himself a high enough plateau to fallfrom -pitching the performance so as to incorporate all
its dimensions.
...When not in a scene, Judi Dench sits quietly in a corner, blocking
out distraction as she studies her lines. Wholly still and focused, she brings the same quality of concentration onstage, to connect with
each switch of Cleopatra's mood: when Antony tells her Fulvia is dead, she twirls in scarce-hidden delight, then builds up a storm of
self-pity, flinging away the letter carrying the news, making zig-zag forays of rage to and away from
him ...
Now I see, I see
In Fulvia's death, how mine received shall be.
Realizing she may have gone too far, she melts into submissiveness:
she may not be able to stop him going, but she can counter the pull of Rome by 'conquering in retreat'.
There is a desolation at the heart of the self-dramatizing: Dench has talked of Cleopatra's awareness that this is the last great passion
of her life (comparing her with Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing: 'If she and Benedict didn't get together in that last summer, then
there was no hope. ...'). In the later scene when she disposes of:
My salad days, When I was green in judgement, cold in blood.
... there is a darkness, a bitterness, almost (at this final chance for love),
which Hall catches at: 'You had it, Judi! Build on that.' He refers to 'menopausal love', the evidence that Cleopatra was already
middle-aged: 'her waned lip', 'age cannot wither her' (i.e. an age already
arrived at), her reference to herself as 'wrinkled deep in time' and the
long pause when she hears that Octavia is (only) thirty, all of which the actress digests. A growing element of desperation will suffuse
Cleopatra's hold over Antony. He is the centre ofher world, the force round which she circles, reacting, play-acting, to his every mood:
If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing, if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick.
To Dench, Hall says of Cleopatra's perversity and mercurial switches: 'You shouldn't ever let them get a single idea of her.' To
Hopkins, 'You don't have to play the whole man in every scene.' It seems an exact appraisal of the different 'rhythms' at which their
temperaments operate.
Day by day, Judi Dench is absorbing the many facets of the character and tapping her own qualities to give them substance: the
energy, the quick intelligence and wit, the 'gutsiness', the
femininity, the playfulness, the authority, the pensiveness and
vulnerability. Both on and offstage, a warm relationship with Cleopatra's entourage has developed (and it is not surprising to learn,
later, that it is with the Cleopatra who had the common touch and inspired great loyalty, the Cleopatra whom Enobarbus once saw
'Hop forty paces through the public street', that Dench most closely identifies).
Her movements are becoming feline, as she prowls and wheels. On the attack, she is like a darting cobra. She takes some convincing by
Hall that her many entrances 'sweeping through those doors' will not be dull. Each is, in fact, arresting, as she possesses the stage in
a new
and unpredictable mood: she throws herself to the ground and stretches full-length for 'Give me to drink mandragora', evoking a
heat-induced lethargy (Act I Scene 5). One feels the brooding
restlessness of 'Give me some music. ..Let it alone! Let's to billiards', which will erupt into her attack on the Messenger/Eros
(Act II Scene 5) and the impatience of the jealous mistress who wants to cross-examine him about Octavia- 'Where is the fellow?' -in Act
III Scene 3.
Within each scene is a whole range of colourings: the barbed digs at
Mardian, full of sexual innuendo, ripen into blatant sexual longing, as she curls up with her head in Charmian's lap: '0 happy horse,
to bear the weight of Antony!' She radiates joy when Alexas brings a message from him (which she leans forward to hear whilst her
women examine the pearl ring he has sent, on her outstretched hand). The venom with which she lashes out at Charmian for teasing
her about Julius Caesar is capped by the glee of a tyrant at her capacity to 'unpeople Egypt'. An infatuated woman then races off
happily, to write to her lover.
In Act II Scene 5, she has entered morose and irritable, her court lurking by the door, wary of her caprices, hoping she will find
something to amuse her. Charmian runs forward to share the
intimate reminiscence of:
that night I laughed him into patience; and next morn
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed:
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.
The rest keep well back, terrified ofher fury against the bearer of bad tidings (Eros) on whom she draws a knife (afterwards making as if to
throttle Charmian who has dared to defend him). A moment of sad self-awareness:
These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself. ..
is followed by Dench's ironic interpretation of:
Though it be honest, it is never good
To bring bad news ...
but in the catch of her darkened, husky voice, as she repeats 'He is married?', and until the end of the scene, is the full weight of
Cleopatra's despair. In a later rehearsal Dench introduces a vocal block in pronouncing 'Octavia' , as if the word chokes her. In the final
speech, she hurls herself into Charmian's protective arms with a full-throated howl of pain; it is both child-like and animal.
When Cleopatra recalls the Messenger in Act III Scene 3, Dench shows her self-possession and imperiousness apparently restored.
She fires off a series of questions about Antony's new wife and seems to be delighted with the answers (or at least the interpretation she
puts upon them). However, the forlorn aside contained in:
That Herod's head
I'll have; but how, when Antony is gone,
Through whom I might command it?
establishes an undercurrent of anxiety, held throughout the scene by
Charmian's over-rapid responses:
CLEOPATRA ... He cannot like her long.
CHARMIAN ... Like her? O Isis! 'Tis impossible.
CLEOPATRA ... The man hath seen some majesty and should know.
CHARMIAN ... Hath he seen majesty? ...
Her court shadow Cleopatra's every move, including crowding in behind her like a flock of birds when, dignity shaken, she rushes for
the door on hearing that Octavia is younger than she. They have suffered with her through her present grief, admire her courage -
and will die with her at the play's end. (Peter Hall: ' All of this would
have had special meaning for Shakespeare's audience. Elizabeth I, when raddled with age, was still treated by her devoted court as
though she was young and desirable.') The actors extract every comic inflection from the scene. Hall's
detailed direction does not let them - or us - lose sight of its haunting
poignancy, the reality of the mistress displaced by the wife.
... Now their coming together is much more loaded: a serrated
uncertainty has replaced the elegaic flow. They form a long diagonal on the ground, she supplicating, he withdrawn. When he at last
reclines to kiss her, the deadness in him melted by her tears, the break in tension is palpable.
Still later, when seen in the context of a run-through, more can be drawn from this scene. It had seemed to confront Antony and
Cleopatra with the inescapable truth of their relationship: that she has the superior strength and that he is tied to her every move.
Following their rapprochement, Hopkins instinctively pulls away and exits alone, leaving her to hurry after him. He seems to be trying
to break away from her spell. ...
... Before Judi Dench can accept the change, she wrestles with the
interpretation of 'I must stay his time': despite the 'his', Hall is
convinced that she addresses Antony directly. As a key to Cleopatra's attitude to him and the steeliness in her own character, its overall
effect needs to be rationalized. (She will also talk to Peggy Ashcroft about her handling of the emotions involved
- a goodly image of one actress passing the baton to another - and gain her insight into an
earlier line in the scene: in reply to Antony's taunt that she save herself by sending his grizzled head to Caesar, Cleopatra's 'That
head, my lord?' should contain all her love for him.)
I perceive the way Dench works to be a careful layering process (which is in no way to exclude the intuitive leaps and on-the-spot
inventiveness - but she does put down very solid foundations). It is therefore of great concern when a piece of the intricate structure is
replaced. Since Anthony Hopkins tends to work in emotional 'slabs', minor adjustments are for him less painful. Hopkins: 'The all-pervading love is still there, isn't it? But it gets buried in disaster and
only re-emerges at the end.'
Hall nods, thinks about it, then says: 'We end up feeling immense pity for them, both, for him in his madness, and for her, that she is
entangled with it and remains staunch.'
... There is general agreement to set the scene in the early evening:
Cleopatra will come through the doors with the light behind her, two flambeaux illuminating the darkened stage. Dench, only half joking:
'Oh, it would be wonderful to play it all in the dark, back to the
audience, way upstage!'
At moments like this one gets a glimpse of her anxiety about a part which is notoriously difficult. Both she and Hopkins have spoken of
waking at four in the morning, with the lines running through their heads. Once she talked of a feeling of despair. ..another time asked, Am I too English?' Hopkins' anxieties focus, overtly, on his
difficulties with 'these tongue-twisting lines'. For all his apparent
freedom and lack of self-consciousness, he is later to say: 'I have to make
a tremendous effort to let myself go - to rely on my instincts and all the work laid in at rehearsals
- before I can start to enjoy apart and liberate its elements.' He would like less of what Hall had called his
'dark, Welsh side': 'Too much introspection doesn't help, does it?'
Continually forcing himself through boundaries, he quotes from Goethe along the lines of 'Be bold and your courage will conquer the
darkness'.
When asked (at the end of the rehearsal period) what aspect of Antony's character he finds most difficult, the actor says
unhesitatingly: 'His glamour and attractiveness'. Often cast in films and television series for his romantic appeal, Hopkins has a very
different self-image: 'I mean, look at me. Short, grey-haired. ...I find it very difficult to go out onstage and lean against the furniture
with, you know, the right kind of confidence. It feels ridiculous.
Then I think, what the hell, I'll believe I'm like that. ...' (In an industry which deals in idealized images, writer David Thomson
describes the first meeting between Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty:* Nicholson approaches, looks up at Beatty who is five or six
inches taller than he is, whistles and says: 'Now that's what a film star's supposed to look like.')
Judi Dench, too, finds most difficult about her character the need to fight physical
preconceptions. In her case they are not so much personal as those of an audience who expect to see a Cleopatra who is
dark, slim and young - what Peter Hall called the 'Cecil B. De Mille,
G. B. Shaw, Liz Taylor undulating-sexpot image'. 'But,' says Dench, 'the more we go on, the more I am convinced that Peter has
got it right, the play is about middle-aged people.'
In both of them there is great vulnerability: the larger the role, the greater the reputation of the actress or actor involved, the more they
risk in exposure.
WEEK 10 - Run-Through: Parts One & Two
The actors make an exhilarated start. Anthony Hopkins is experimenting freely. In their opening scene, he and Judi Dench tussle and
go down on the floor so that he is lying astride her, for 'here is my space'.
It is a new possibility which Hopkins explores to its limits - since he will not let go of Cleopatra, the two of them roll about on the
ground until the other actors onstage are laughing, as is Hall. We get the picture. So do the Roman Ambassadors, who are deeply
offended.
... By 11.00 the next morning, they are back to continue. John
Bluthal, in rough-textured robes and sandals, a dark beard framing his jaw,
could be a figure out of a nineteenth-century painting of the Holy Land.
Cleopatra's death scene is a series of logistical obstacles. The
throne is carried to the front of the monument. Helen Fitzgerald collects the voluminous gold robe. Chitty shows her how to prepare it
so as to slip it over Dench's outstretched arms with minimal delay.
Miranda Foster finds it difficult to place the elaborate gold crown on Dench's head whilst standing behind her. Then the garter snake
proves over-active and Cleopatra (supposedly dead) giggles helplessly as it slithers down her arm. The crown repeatedly slips off
when she slumps sideways. Before she can remove the busily exploring snake, Foster must prop Cleopatra up and fix her crown. Finally,
the throne bearing the queen proves too cumbersome to be carried up the centre aisle. Objects seem to be sabotaging
action ...
... Judi Dench is feeling insecure, terrified by the height of the
monument ('I'm so paralysed with fear up there that I don't know what comes out of me. ...') and bothered about her shoes. Alison
Chitty brings various pairs for her to try -about none of which is she completely happy: 'If only I could get out and buy something. I
know exactly what I want. ...' Yet, in the midst of anxiety, her focus is unswerving: is there
anything, she wonders, that was uncovered during rehearsals which she may have since forgotten? 'Only the birth of Cleopatra's twins,' I
tease. In her black velvet tracksuit and boots, her blonde hair catching the light, she looks slight and vulnerable against the great
circle of the darkened stage.
... Although the opening sequence is uneasy - could the audience be
taken aback by the sexual rough-and-tumble between Dench and Hopkins? -
at their next entrance, these two take command. Many of Dench's perverse lines and capricious swirls get laughter: she
responds with added bite. Hopkins gives the language more weight; sensing attentiveness, he locks in to each moment, adding but also
leaving out gestures which one had come to anticipate in rehearsal, if
they no longer ring true. Likewise heightened, Pigott-Smith's performance makes Caesar awkward and ill-at-ease, as he sits twisting
one ankle behind the other, picking petulantly at the arm of his chair.
... When Hall telephoned Dench to tell her about the improvement it
emerged that she had been growing more and more depressed throughout the production week. She felt that the play had lost
direction and that she was 'on a choppy sea, unsure of the voyage being taken'.
She put her finger on it when she said that the feeling between Antony and Cleopatra had gone. Without the central love, the
romantic passion, we do not care about them, and all the peripheral
action becomes.meaningless. Dench was speaking from a honed intuitive sense, but, of course,
if one analyses the chemistry between onlooker and performer, a mechanical hiccup should not have destroyed attention to the extent
that it did. An emotionally involved audience would have wanted to preserve, or to be led back to, the necessary state of 'suspended
disbelief' .
Hall decided that he, Dench and Hopkins should get together in a session on the Monday morning: the intention
- to rediscover the premise on which Antony and Cleopatra rests.
Accordingly, on Monday the rest of the cast were not called until the afternoon, whilst Hall returned to the rehearsal room with his
two leading actors ...
... Above all, the axis of the play has been restored. Dench is no
longer fighting for Hopkins' attention but has it wholly. When she dresses him in his armour, there is great tenderness between them,
an echo of their former playfulness. Their passion may have brought them to the brink of destruction, but, as long as it holds
- and we see evidence of its endurance - the rewards of the external world seem
petty and well-lost by comparison.
... The cast are exhilarated, running off the adrenalin built up
through the evening. At one point during the play, Judi Dench had crashed into a wall-section as she rushed off the darkened stage.
Relieved that this was the only mishap, she shrugs off the swollen lip which is the result: 'I've never before experienced a first night when
my nerves were entirely taken up with problems. Either I was busy preparing to haul Tony up, or leap from the monument, or deal with
the snake. ...It was wonderfully focusing!'
... More than anything, the relationship between Cleopatra and
Antony becomes deep-rooted: it was in the later Thidias scene that
something had triggered between Dench and Hopkins which, for me, told its truth. Hopkins was now playing Antony, in defeat, as
swashbuckling, willful, dangerous. Accusing Cleopatra of being 'a boggler ever', what had formerly been only verbal now becomes, by
inevitable extension, physical abuse - he pushes, prods and shoves at her, and, for all her spirit, Cleopatra suddenly seems powerless.
(I even have a glimpse of a battered wife.) Mimicking how she let Caesar's ambassador kiss her hand, Antony also kisses it
- then spits.
When the bloodied Thidias is brought back, Antony lies down beside him, luxuriating in his power to punish. It is horrendous
Roman sadism and the 'soft' Alexandrians are repelled. Finally,
when Cleopatra kneels on the floor to protest her love for him, Antony strolls out of the room.
Just when one thinks he has gone for ever, he returns to stand behind her and at last accepts her words:
'I am satisfied'. At that moment, Cleopatra collapses into helpless sobs.
He kneels to comfort her, cradling her in his arms ...
A blinding light is cast on their relationship: neurotic, all-consuming and obsessional, it is far beyond the realms of reason or
judgement. This is indeed Shakespeare's 'madness of love', the
'vagaries of passion ... the quite intolerable ways men and women treat each other when they are emotionally and sexually dependent
on one another', as spoken of by Hall ...
Note from Chris: I hope that these
photos and text excerpts have given you some insight
into this play and the behind-the-scenes machinations of what it took to
stage it. I highly
recommend reading this book. You can purchase it
at: Website
Online Store
November 25, 2006
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