RSC Friends

 Photograph by Helen Maybanks.

Rome and its braying fanfares proclaim its military might through the public humiliation of the vanquished in an official triumph. Meanwhile, Cleopatra’s court beguiles the listener with music that is elusive and dreamlike.
Cleopatra, regal and seductive, offers Antony a tantalising glimpse of a hedonistic and exotic world remote from Rome’s ceaseless demands. At the centre is The Egyptian queen – bewitching and mercurial. Constant in her love for Antony she quizzes Diomedes about the attractions of Octavia, her rival for Antony’s affections, in a scene where acid wit and comic timing delight the audience.

The lovers self absorption generate tensions within the governing Roman triumvirate. Notwithstanding attempts to heal the rift through Mark Antony’s ill judged marriage to Octavius’s sister divisions widen. Anger bubbles up within the ruling triumvirate, an attempt to create an illusion of cameraderie through a shipboard drinking session is predictably doomed to failure.

Antony and Cleopatra are both determined to avoid a shameful and degrading death. Nonetheless, Mark Antony’s botched and prolonged suicide is a messy and ignoble affair. Cleopatra manages a more memorable, dignified, and tragic death. It is some consolation that the lovers escape the horror of Octavius’s triumph.