Sex, Power and Propaganda: Shakespeare’s Epic Returns to Melbourne
Political scheming. Sex. Betrayal. Warfare. Propaganda. Two of the most powerful people in the world conducting a love affair while an empire begins to collapse around them.
If that sounds more like Game of Thrones or Succession than Shakespeare, that may be exactly why Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s CLEOPATRA & ANTHONY feels like a play audiences need to see now. Shakespeare’s rarely performed epic comes to fortyfivedownstairs this August, and director Sonya Suares is promising something big: 13 actors, two empires, an intensely physical production and a Cleopatra very different from the one history has handed us. AussieTheatre spoke with Suares about why this rarely staged Shakespeare might just belong at the top of your must-see Melbourne theatre list.
Suares isn’t interested in giving us another portrait of history’s great seductress. She wants to put Cleopatra back at the centre of her own extraordinary story. “She’s so often de-centred in her own incredible narrative,” Suares says.
All too frequently she becomes an idea, an ideal, an exoticised outline, the ultimate femme fatale whose compelling power over Antony unmans him.
The woman Suares has uncovered is considerably more interesting.
This is a woman who spoke ten languages and was renowned as a scholar. A princess who outmanoeuvred two brother-husbands in the blood sport that was Ptolemaic dynastic history to claim the throne of Egypt via a tactical relationship with none other than Julius Caesar.
Then Caesar is assassinated, Cleopatra escapes Rome and goes on to forge one of history’s most consequential political alliances, and romances, with Mark Antony.
What changes when you put Cleopatra at the centre of her own story is that it becomes the multi-faceted, ground-shaking, nail-biting game of thrones that it actually was.
Suddenly, the bigger question is why we don’t see this Shakespeare more often.
Perhaps part of the answer is sheer scale. ANTONY and CLEOPATRA is enormous. Armies, battles, political marriages, sex, jealousy, shifting alliances and the future of an empire collide across Egypt and Rome, and Melbourne Shakespeare Company has no intention of making any of it smaller. Thirteen actors will fill the intimate fortyfivedownstairs, supported by an ambitious design and a production built around physicality, movement and the force of a full ensemble.
Oooft. I won’t lie, it’s definitely a challenge, Suares admits. But then the truth is that most of the theatre that moves me, the most genuinely raw, compelling, gripping and yes, epic, work I’ve seen has been made by indie theatre makers.
Her design team are “spinning straw into gold”, while she describes her ensemble as “thirteen absolute rock-stars who commit muscularly and whole-heartedly to the dimensions of this story. We’re very much building a world on stage and their combined energies, talent and commitment is a force to behold.” At a time when large casts are becoming increasingly rare on Australian stages, there is something deliciously audacious about squeezing Rome, Egypt and 13 performers into fortyfivedownstairs. This is Shakespeare going big in a room where the audience will be close enough to feel every battle, betrayal and shifting allegiance.
Yet for all the armies, politics and spectacle, Suares says one of the biggest discoveries in the rehearsal room has been just how much love Shakespeare packed into the play.
As this cast dive deeper and deeper, I’ve become more sensitised to the sheer volume of love stories playing out in the text simultaneously.
There is Cleopatra and Antony, of course, but also Cleopatra and Charmian, Antony and Enobarbus, Antony and Eros, and an expanded relationship between Octavius Caesar and his mentor Agrippa. “It’s often touted that one of the central themes of this play is betrayal, but I’d argue it’s more accurately a play about allegiances, about capital L Love.” And perhaps that is where this sprawling 400-year-old epic becomes unexpectedly human. These are people desperately trying to hold onto love, loyalty and identity while the political world shifts beneath them. Their private choices can change the fate of nations; their enemies are fighting not only to defeat them, but to control how history will remember them.
And that last idea feels particularly potent now.
There’s an immediacy to this telling that makes the contemporary parallels of all the geo-political scheming in this story feel more resonant, Suares says.
A political thriller, an epic romance, a battle over truth and a world in which powerful people are constantly attempting to control the narrative, suddenly Cleopatra & Antony doesn’t feel very ancient at all.
Melbourne Shakespeare Company has form when it comes to making audiences hungry for Shakespeare. After numerous sell-out seasons, the company has built a fiercely loyal following for intimate, ambitious productions that refuse to treat these plays like museum pieces. Its productions regularly attract some of Melbourne’s best established and emerging talent, and audiences have increasingly learned that waiting until closing week to book is a risky strategy.
This time, the company is taking on one of Shakespeare’s biggest and least-seen works with 13 actors, two ancient superpowers, one extraordinary love affair and a director determined to unleash everything that has been hiding inside the play all along.
If Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s track record is anything to go by, CLEOPATRA & ANTONY won’t just be one of this winter’s most ambitious productions. It may well be one of its hottest tickets.
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