Shakespeare’s A & C

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies."

I don’t know where to start with the performance tonight of Anthony and Cleopatra that I saw through NT Live. Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo play the famous fated couple.

Having watched the National Theatre film on you tube about making the costumes for the show, I had my eyes on the material in Cleopatra’s dress – the flow of her capes, the embroidery on the bottom of her coat, that saffron dress. Hearing that the designers were giving a nod to the Beyonce album Lemonade, I had to go out and take a look at what that even was – talk about a person getting behind on pop culture references.

... half time at the theatre ...

I was lucky to make it there at all.
I overshot my Metro link by 2 stops.

I was looking at the other people in the theatre who came in twos and threes, though some were alone like me.

And it looked like a mature couple with their also mature son and daughter-in-law in front of me, but not many other groups were in fours.

A couple beside us left at the half. I can always tell when they gather their coats and bags and look as though they are never to return.

Since the setting was not historical and didn’t really take my attention, I spent a lot of time thinking about the flow of the speech, the beautiful diction, about how easy it was for me to listen to language that was written 300 years ago.

 “This is a lot easier to listen to,” I heard a lady say who was lose to me, “than to try to read”.

I was thinking about my own children as I heard them practise their speech lessons. How I have heard them do their articulation exercises, and try to learn about the author or how this poem or clip fits into the massive amount of English literature around us. And I was thinking of Kiwanis’s Festival performances and of holding their shaking hands as they nervously waited for their turn to perform.

.... the Montreal Hockey Forum is
now a movie house ...

Oh boy!

The performance of Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.

Just when I thought he had the show in the palm of his hands, then I saw it shift into the palm of her hands. 

Such power between them.

I refreshed my mind on the plot of the show through Wiki, but didn’t have time to find 10 famous phrases from this play.

That had to wait until I cam home. Refreshing my mind on some of the figures I would be seeing and on the general shape of the plot was not a bad idea.

High points of the show:

1. a live snake giving the kiss of death to Cleopatra
2. Mark Anthony having a messenger whipped
3. the set with the pool and walk ways through the pool
4. both Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okone using their whole body – legs and arms and feet, even their fingers caressing skin, just so moving.
5. not to overdo it, but the costuming is glorious – sumptuous for Cleopatra and so neutral for her ladies

I am up to seeing the show again when it comes back in January. I hope there is some space for me tomorrow to go out and look as a few more complex analyses of the plot.

Arta