ANTONY & CLEOPATRA

and

ROMEO & JULIET

Both at Botanic Gardens, Glasgow

Both until July 7

Reviewed by Mark Brown

One never ceases to be impressed by Bard In The Botanics, Glasgow’s annual mini-festival of Shakespeare (and, occasionally, his contemporaries). There’s something gloriously defiant in its insistence that high-quality productions of classical, Renaissance dramas can be staged, virtually on a shoestring, both outdoors in the unreliable Glaswegian summer and in the beautiful, but not inherently theatrical, Kibble Palace glasshouse.

It takes a considerable degree of inventiveness to adapt Shakespeare’s epic Antony & Cleopatra from a play with a cast of more than 40 to a coherent drama with just nine characters. It is more ingenious still to incorporate seamlessly into that adaptation fragments of John Dryden’s play All For Love.

That is what Bard In The Botanics’ artistic director Gordon Barr has done with this compelling production. Performed in the Kibble, it boasts not only a clever, engaging script, but also excellent performances by lead actors Nicole Cooper and Andy Clark.

The sightlines in the narrow walkway in which the audience is seated aren’t great, the sets are, by necessity, minimal, and the acoustics leave something to be desired. Yet, like the warrior actors they are, Barr’s cast deliver the play with a powerful directness, as if injecting it straight into one’s bloodstream.

Cooper plays the Egyptian queen Cleopatra with a brilliantly balanced combination of aristocratic arrogance, sensual persuasiveness and passionate recklessness. Clark’s Roman leader Mark Antony is like a man constantly on the verge of being ripped in two, so torn are his instincts between the politic (the demands of Rome) and the erotic (his desire for Cleopatra).

Barr’s version of the story cuts excellently to the heart of the matter. Octavius Caesar (like Antony, one of the triumvirate who replaced the slain emperor Julius Caesar) confronts Antony’s inconstancy with, by turns, diplomatic and military means.

Laurie Scott plays Caesar with a straight bat. Although sneeringly certain of his power, he also seems jealous of the great passion between Cleopatra and Antony.

As his military fortunes collapse, Clark’s Antony appears like a more cerebral, more callous version of Macbeth in his final hours. Raging like a wounded bull, his arbitrary decision to have his loyal friend Enobarbus flogged chills the blood.

Indeed, this act of vicious despotism is rendered all the more affecting by Adam Donaldson’s fine playing of the wretched Enobarbus. Veering between disbelief and dignified suffering, Donaldson’s performance manages to render believable his character’s continued sense of honour and loyalty.

A word, too, for Leonora Cooke, a young actor currently training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, who shows great promise in her performance of Octavia (Caesar’s unlucky sister, who finds herself in a political marriage to Antony). Cooke shows a strong facility for Renaissance language, not least in her great, self-asserting “I have a soul” speech (taken from Dryden’s play).

All-in-all, this production (which comes in at a little over two hours) is impressively well paced, with nice, minimal, quasi-period design (by Carys Hobbs) and a memorable use of dramatic music and song. When it reaches its bloody conclusion (complete with poisonous asp), one feels that this smart staging has avoided the pitfalls of melodrama and expressed much of the timeless tragedy of Shakespeare’s play.

The same cannot be said, sadly, of the drama’s companion piece, director Jennifer Dick’s production of Romeo & Juliet, which is presented on the festival’s outdoor stage in the gardens. In fairness, despite the recent fine weather, opening night (Friday, June 22) was not the best evening on which to begin the run. It was deceptively cold as Dick’s largely young cast took to a graffiti-covered stage dominated by the word “Verona”.

As the audience shivered, there was little in this staging of the Bard’s famous love story to warm us up.

If, like the great Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, you believe that young love is a mere preparation, a learning for the deeper love of the coming years, the story of Romeo & Juliet is as improbable as it is dramatic. This production does nothing to persuade us otherwise.

Its cross-casting (Esme Bayley plays the ill-fated Mercutio, among a number of feminised male roles) and cross-dressing nod towards current debates around gender. However, this is as close as this ambiguously modern(ish) production gets to anything thematically coherent.

There is a strong emphasis on the comic, not least in the role of Angel, a character built from the role of Juliet’s Nurse, as written by Shakespeare. A camp, working-class Glaswegian guy who knows how to run in high heels and can clearly kick his own height, it is not the most challenging role the talented Darren Brownlie will ever play (and he performs it with hilarious and sympathetic aplomb).

Elsewhere, however, the production suffers from both its lack of a convincing, over-arching idea and an unevenness in its casting. The reimagining of the disastrous meddler Friar Laurence (who is a Franciscan monk) as a female, Protestant minister (played ably by Linda Duncan McLaughlin) begs more conceptual questions than it answers.

The soundtrack (a rough assemblage of modern pop music, including Radiohead and Massive Attack) is too obvious in its emotional instructions, and the various fight scenes are weak. Dylan Blore’s Romeo shifts between adolescent playfulness and teenage angst, but lacks moral weight.

Rebecca Robin’s promising performance as Juliet is more nuanced and more knowing, but she is swimming against the tide of a generally misconceived production.