1972 Charlton Heston Film

In a 1972 film of Antony and Cleopatra directed by (and starring), Charlton Heston; Heston played Antony; Hildegarde Neil was Cleopatra; Eric Porter was Enobarbus; and John Castle was Octavius Caesar.

Samuel Crowl, in a brief section about this production (157–59) from a 1994 article titled “A World Elsewhere: The Roman Plays on Film and Television,” thought the film had “a promising opening” (157), but disliked its “overwrought” score (158). Saying that Heston had attempted to “domesticate” the play, he also greatly disliked the use of colors (158), found Neil’s Cleopatra lacking in power, thought Heston depicted Rome more convincingly than Egypt, but particularly disliked the performance of Porter as Enobarbus. Crowl concluded that “Heston’s film not only fails visually, and verbally, to capture the dynamics of Shakespeare’s play but also fails to create an interesting epic inspired by a Shakespearean source” (159). He repeated these arguments later in a book published in 2008.

In a book issued in 2000 and titled Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love (198–202), Douglas Brode reported that Neil’s performance was considered so bad that brief plans were actually formulated “to refilm all of [her] scenes with another actress in her place, a concept never before attempted with a previously released movie. That,” he explained, ultimately “did not happen.” Instead, “Antony and Cleopatra was eventually written off as a tax deduction for Heston, who did not direct again, later recalling how he ‘dragged Antony and Cleopatra kicking and screaming to the screen.’” Nonetheless, Brode felt that Heston’s own performance was “[c]learly a case of personal expression,” saying “the part allowed an actor who ordinarily disappears in diverse roles to express his own deeply held belief in individual responsibility for one’s actions. Mark Antony was, simply, the single part Charlton Heston always knew he was born to play, proving that in this film” (202).

In another book from 2000, this one titled Shakespeare on Screen, Daniel Rosenthal indicted the Heston film as an “overlong, underbudgeted epic” with a “sluggish” pace and “gratuitous background action” and called Neil “a Cleopatra incapable of mastering one of Shakespeare’s most demanding roles” (158). Although he considered the sets and locations adequate, he found one particular “montage” (involving “close-ups of vast, sturdy replica ships intercut with long shots of tiny, flimsy models”) merely “laughable,” accusing it of “ruining the pivotal moment when Cleopatra betrays Antony.” He called a later betrayal-in-battle episode “more effective” but said that even it still fell “far short of Hollywood epic standards.” Heston, he wrote, “cannot resist over-indulging his own, epic image, so we watch Antony fighting his way through Roman horsemen with apparently superhuman strength.” Nonetheless, Rosenthal considered Heston’s performance more moving than Neil’s, asserting that the latter’s “[p]erfect cheekbones and lip-gloss do not compensate for a nondescript personality and insensitive handling of the verse, particularly in the tense build-up to Cleopatra’s suicide; she is,” he continued, “embarrassingly outacted by her lady-in-waiting, Charmian (the seductive and moving Jane Lapotaire, a fine Cleopatra for the BBC in 1981” [158]). Rosenthal praised some of the British actors involved but reported that even Heston himself considered the film a failure (159).

Discussing the Heston production in her 2006 book titled Antony and Cleopatra, part of the Shakespeare Handbook series, Bridget Escolme (148–51) asserted that the sea is a “central metaphor for the film” but regretted that the Egyptian setting and “unrelenting orchestral music will seem dated to viewers today” (149). Although she also regretted “impassioned ranting from Heston” and the ways some episodes were “drastically cut and the sequence of scenes … reordered,” she was intrigued by the interesting focus on “indigenous populations” (149). She felt that Cleopatra’s status had been “much reduced by this film,” so that the Egyptian queen “becomes less of a character and more of a love object” (149) while Heston was featured in an “archetypal filmic quest for male identity.” Wishing that Cleopatra had received more emphasis, she concluded by calling the film’s resolution too easy (151).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (324–28), considered Heston miscast as Cleopatra’s slave, which alone made the film flawed. He thought the opening was badly handled (325); considered Enobarbus miscast; and regarded various scenes as misinterpreted (326). He found Hildegarde Neil’s Cleopatra at variance with Shakespeare’s (326); regarded the production as too “epic”; and criticized the production’s Caesar. He said that Heston lacked pathos; accused the final act of omitting important information about Cleopatra’s suicide (327); and condemned this version for “gross imperfections” (328).

1974 Trevor Nunn/Jon Scofield Production

In 1974, Jon Scofield directed a televised version of Antony and Cleopatra based on a production that had earlier been directed onstage by Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). The film starred Richard Johnson as Mark Antony; Janet Suzman as Cleopatra; and Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus.

James C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their very fine 1988 collection Shakespeare on Television, surveyed a variety of almost entirely early positive reactions to this production. One writer praised the “intelligence and cunning” of Suzman’s Cleopatra; another called the adaptation “superb” and yet another termed it “splendid”; while Robert Speaight praised the stage performance on which the film was based the “best production of the play I have seen.” He extolled Janet Suzman’s “breadth of style,” calling her Cleopatra “naturally royal without being affectedly regal” and said that above all else she was “lovable.” Speaight also admired Richard Johnson’s Antony, mentioning his “careless grandeur and irresistible largesse”; and also commended Patrick Stewart’s Enobarbus (246). Coursen himself, reviewing the production, wrote that it “allowed Antony and Cleopatra to grow, as they do in the play, through a series of ebbings and flowings,” and if he found Johnson “only semi-convincing most of the way,” he extolled the work of practically everyone else in the cast, including Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, Corin Redgrave, Mary Rutherford, and Morgan Sheppard. Despite thinking that “Johnson’s Antony seldom projected a sense of even former greatness,” Coursen called this adaptation among “the finest Shakespeare television has ever offered” (247).

Coursen, in his 1992 book titled Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation (190–98), wrote that the Scofield/Nunn production, “presented on American commercial TV” by ABC in 1975, “had the advantage of a stage history behind it.” He noted that the respected critic Robert Speaight particularly praised Suzman by saying “[she] has the breadth which the part demands. She enchants the eye and ear, and satisfies the mind.” Speaight also “found that Richard Johnson’s Antony ‘had a careless grandeur and irresistible largesse’” (190). Coursen felt that the “translation to television incorporated all of the things that television can do well. The ‘varying shores of the world’ are not reached for here, but they are not missed, so luminous are the individual performances.” Asserting that the “design of this production turns television into a suggestive medium and demonstrates how the vivid contrasts of this huge script can be fitted to the small screen,” Coursen said that although the film “does not try for ‘mythology,’” it does capture “the ‘irreconcilable’ zones of Rome and Egypt. The settings, augmented by background sounds, are effectively allegorical, seldom explicit.” According to Coursen, the “production benefits from that fitting of word to action, action to word that must occur at every instant of a Shakespeare production” (191). Calling this version “probably the finest Shakespearean production on television up to 1975,” Coursen claimed that it had “been rivaled since by only two or three BBC productions and possibly by the Thames Macbeth.” He disliked the commercials that broke into the American broadcast but noted that “John J. O’Connor, television critic of the New York Times, gave a rave review,” calling this version a “marvelously imaginative interpretation, beautifully performed,” but added, however, that “O’Connor had seen the production sans commercials” (195). Samuel Crowl, in his 1994 article “A World Elsewhere: The Roman Plays on Film and Television” (153–55), was equally enthusiastic: calling this production “brilliant,” he praised all the leading performers; admired the contrasts in appearance and atmosphere between Rome and Egypt; commended the imagery (153); and also praised the sound track (155).

Bridget Escolme, in her 2006 book on the play, noted (146–48) that the Scofield/Nunn film had clearly been shot in a studio, with the setting sometimes deliberately blurred, sometimes more sharply realistic, and with occasional glimpses of crowds (146). She called Suzman an especially “self-consciously performing Cleopatra,” a queen who is aware that her power is fragile. Commenting that Antony’s gradual loss of power “clearly revolts Cleopatra” (147), Escolme nonetheless called the couple “richly drawn and engaging” but found Caesar extremely cold. She termed this version of the play “a self-conscious filmed [stage] production,” adding that “we wonder whose version of events we are watching,” suggesting that perhaps it is Cleopatra’s, as her “dignified self-control in death” implies (148). Samuel Crowl, in his 2008 book titled Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide, briefly commented in passing that the Scofield/ Nunn production implies place rather than showing it (74), using soft focus for Egypt and sharp images for Rome (75).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (328–29), thought that Janet Suzman closely approximated Shakespeare’s Cleopatra; admired the (anachronistic) sets and costumes and the contrasts between Egypt and Rome (328); and praised various moments (329). He reported that the final scene is severely cut but said the suicide is well-handled (329).

In her 2020 book on Antony and Cleopatra published as part of the Shakespeare in Performance series, Carol Chillington Rutter, on pages 92–114, commented on the RSC stage production on which the later film was based. She wrote that “Suzman’s Cleopatra was unashamedly a female philanderer, a sensualist. But her body was the seat of her political power as well as her pleasure, a dichotomy equally topical in the world outside the theatre and still disturbing to a generation just learning to assert a separation of those spheres while experiencing the lived reality of their overlap.” Rutter continued that “Suzman’s Cleopatra, in line with the times of the women in the audience who were watching her (some no doubt approving, others no doubt aghast), was a ‘liberated woman’ testing the problematic power of promiscuity and the misogynistic taxonomy of female sexual activity” (106). She described Suzman’s queen as a “watchful Cleopatra” who “kept her options open” (106). Rutter felt that Suzman’s “Cleopatra was constructed not just as racially Other, but as powerfully racially Other” who was described in a program pamphlet as white but who was visually illustrated in the same pamphlet as black (112).

1981 BBC Television Shakespeare Production

The 1981 BBC Television Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Jonathan Miller, starred Colin Blakely as Antony; Jane Lapotaire as Cleopatra; Emrys James as Enobarbus; and Ian Charleson as Octavius Caesar.

Henry Fenwick, in his valuable discussion of the production included in the BBC booklet devoted to this play, reported that Jonathan Miller, serving both as producer and director, first tried to create a convincing look inspired by paintings by Veronese. Miller sought a Renaissance approach to classical culture (as in Veronese’s painting of Darius at the feet of Alexander), and an avoidance of literal realism, as in stereotyped depictions of pyramids (17–18). Alun Hughes, costume designer, explained how clothes had to be modified (18–19), while Colin Lowrey, the set designer, was inspired mainly by Renaissance painters such as Veronese, Poussin, and Michelangelo (19–20). Meanwhile, Miller explained how he chose the cast, particularly Jane Lapotaire as Cleopatra and Colin Blakely as Antony—both talented performers but not ones known for their looks or sexiness. Instead, Lapotaire stressed Cleopatra’s ambition, political astuteness, and lust for life (21). Miller compared Antony to a talented athlete whose best days are past. He considered Enobarbus a far less noble character than he is usually thought to be—in fact, a hanger-on (21–22). David Snodin, the script editor, noted that battle scenes had sometimes been trimmed. And Miller regretted that the scene involving Cleopatra’s jewels had also been pruned to shorten the play and keep a more consistent focus (22–23). He saw the work as fundamentally about the conflict between personal passion and pleasures, on the one hand, and social responsibilities on the other. He considered Antony weak and Cleopatra cunningly sexual. Miller thought Shakespeare showed interest in this kind of conflict between private desire and public duties in other plays as well, such as Henry V and Richard II. He contended that this tension was central to much political thought of Shakespeare’s day (23–24). Miller saw Octavius as a man motivated by a sort of puritanical moralism who nonetheless admires Antony’s largeness of life. Nonetheless, despite these seemingly firm ideas, Miller claimed he learned a lot during rehearsals and therefore modified some of his thinking, with characters only gradually taking their final form (24–25). Jane Lapotaire admired Miller’s stress on nontheatrical speaking on television but also felt the need to discover the play’s grandeur—a grandeur conveyed through intimacy. She thought Cleopatra began to lose interest in Antony when he began to be defeated in war, just as Antony began to lose interest in Cleopatra when he suspected she might be unfaithful. Lapotaire saw this couple’s relationship as unstable from the start (25–26). When the production was being filmed, the speeches were sometimes so intimate that there were worries they might be spoken too softly, but Lapotaire noted that Cleopatra does in fact become more soft-spoken toward the end of the work (26). Although the final scenes were filmed in a hurry because time was running out, all went well despite various challenges (including an uncooperative asp), and Fenwick observed that those watching the filming in the studio were greatly impressed (26–27).

Charles B. Lower, reviewing the BBC production in 1982, wrote that “this Antony deserves neither the near-unanimous complaint registered against the BBC Romeo nor the near-unanimous praise given the BBC Measure for Measure. Miller’s decision to show ‘the foibles and the failings and the human non-heroic characteristics’ of Antony and Cleopatra may diminish but not distort Shakespeare’s script (as Miller has done elsewhere). But,” Lower added, “his casting of Lapotaire as Cleopatra ostensibly to assure stripping the role of its ‘myths about sexual prowess and sensuality’ does little justice to the achievements of both her acting and this production. Although neither voluptuous nor beautiful, this Cleopatra,” according to Lower, “was nevertheless sexually alluring” (2). Lower concluded that “this Antony achieves much. The title pair capture and sustain viewer attention, minor characters such as Emrys James’s Enobarbus are distinctive and memorable, and the richly costumed production has lively pacing. More of us should and will be less unhappy with Jonathan Miller’s Antony than with his Merchant and his Othello” (7).

Herbert R. Coursen, in his 1992 book Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation, wrote that “[i]n addressing a disaster as unmitigated and as monumental as Miller’s Antony and Cleopatra, one is at a loss as to where to begin. This production,” he continued, “is bound to contaminate the attitudes of thousands of students toward this magnificent script. I hope that it is only thousands—it may be millions who will reject Shakespeare on the basis of their dismal experience of one of his masterworks” (195–96). Coursen felt that Miller, by emphasizing Italian Renaissance paintings to inspire the look of the production, “erases the distinction the play makes between Rome and Egypt” and thus “also erases the conflict suffered by Antony.” According to Coursen, “Cleopatra and her court—with the exception of dusky Iris—could have been in Rome. Octavia could have been Cleopatra,” so that viewers “are given a tour through a museum, not a play, and certainly not this play” (197). Even the actors left Coursen unimpressed: he mocked Blakely as “a short, pathetic Antony, who, never having been on the hill, could not be over it” and called Lapotaire “a sexless Cleopatra” and concluded that, in this production, “[b]eautiful pictures cannot compensate for bad casting, obvious under-rehearsal, or the director’s unwillingness to seek the [play’s] tensions and conflicts” (198).

On the other hand, Samuel Crowl, in his 1994 essay titled “A World Elsewhere: The Roman Plays on Film and Television,” found the production interesting (155), calling it “formal, even chaste”; but agreed with Coursen that it “provides no distinction between Egypt and Rome.” He considered the camera work “intentionally static” (156), but ultimately echoed Coursen’s view by calling this version “an intellectually clever misreading, transforming Shakespeare’s most poetically and specially flamboyant play into something small and oddly barren” (157).

Bridget Escolme, in her 2006 overview of the play, wrote that this production’s “prickly, unsensual Cleopatra” reflected Miller’s conscious intent “to work against Hollywood stereotypes of steamy sensuality” (143), so that this Cleopatra’s “lack of sexual contact with Antony seem[ed] all the more deliberate on Miller’s part” (144). Escolme found “little of the play’s exposure of personal tension in public in this production”; defended its Antony against critical attack; and considered Octavius Caesar here not as cold as in other productions (144), writing that here he is “not a repressed psychological oddity” but is affected by “gender and class convention[s]” (145). She admired the effective use of “depth” in the “production’s camera work,” especially when characters “in the foreground [comment] on those in the background” (145) but did think that Miller’s handling of the play reflected the limits of “television realism” (146).

Samuel Crowl, returning to the BBC version in his 2008 Norton Guide, noted that it had been inspired by a painting by Veronese (72–73); repeated some of his earlier complaints (73); found this Cleopatra unappealing (unlike Shakespeare’s); and considered Enobarbus also unappealing in a way that undermined Shakespeare’s tragedy (73). Crowl wrote that this production, like others by Miller for the BBC, was “intellectually fascinating but dramatically perverse” (74).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (329–31), mentioned this production’s almost-complete text, its rapid pace, and its touches of humor (329). He discussed the sets and setting; the ways cameras are used; and the strengths of the performances of this version’s Antony and Cleopatra (330). He found the final half weaker than the first but termed the last act “extremely moving” (331).

1983–84 Lawrence Carra Production

In 1984, Lawrence Carra directed a production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Timothy Dalton as Antony; Lynn Redgrave as Cleopatra; Barrie Ingham as Enobarbus; and Anthony Geary as Octavius.

This production has received little attention from critics, although Bridget Escolme, writing in 2006, did say that “[t]he performers look cramped and slightly too large for the stage,” that “Caesar’s train … is unintentionally comic,” but that Cleopatra’s initially “child-like behaviour … allows her to grow up convincingly as she mourns.” Escolme felt that Antony costumes did “smack, appropriately enough, of a faintly pathetic attempt at grooviness” (142). She thought Dalton acted best in scenes with the other triumvirs (142–43) but thought him “deliberately erratic” with Cleopatra. Escolme concluded that the “declamatory tone of this production finally works in Cleopatra’s favour,” especially in her “rather elegant, tuneful death,” although she ultimately found this version “surprisingly amateurish” (143).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (331–33), praised Lynn Redgrave for an alternately amusing and “moving” Cleopatra; admired the clothing, the actors, and the quick pace; but found some flaws in the lighting, the tone, and some camera work. He considered Timothy Dalton not old enough to play Antony but impressive nonetheless (332) and called this a “good version for study” (333).

Bibliography