Feature:Theatre - Antony and Cleopatra, Hampstead Parish Church - July 9/10
Published: 08 July 2010
by JOSH LOEB
WHETHER in search of spiritual sustenance or more earthly resources like oil, Europeans have been sallying forth into the Middle East with varying degrees of success since western civilisation began.
The exotic plains of Egypt and Arabia have fired the imagination of countless writers, including our greatest.
Antony and Cleopatra, described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early 1800s as “the most wonderful” of Shakespere’s plays, explores our obsession with the East.
It will be performed throughout the summer by the Hampstead Players amateur theatre company in St George’s Gardens, Pimlico and Hampstead Parish Church before going on tour to the town of Puy l’Eveque in France.
“It’s 10 years since we started taking plays to France,” says director Bill Risebero. “It started with Hamlet in 2001. This is a kind of reunion for the people who went on that tour.”
As a nod to one of the golden decades of imperial exploration, Risebero has set the tragic love story about the bond between Roman general Mark Antony and Egyptian queen Cleopatra in the 1920s.
“The parallel is Lawrence of Arabia,” he says. “Cleopatra’s maidens are dressed as flappers or 1920s society women. The Romans are in black.
“The Victorians had this view that Rome was wonderful and could do no wrong and that Egypt was lascivious.
“Nowadays critics see Rome as an oppressive power that was occupying Egypt – and Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra as something that freed him from domination by Caesar.”
It is fitting, says Risebero, that Nigerian-born Gaynor Bassey, a longtime Hampstead Players member, will be playing Cleopatra.
“One of the great Cleopatras of recent times was Janet Suzman, who is herself African, of course, but white African. The Ptolemy dynasty in Egypt, of which Cleopatra was one of the last members, were Greeks, so Cleopatra wouldn’t have been black, but Shakespeare thought she was and there are references in the text to that.”
Bassey, a lawyer by day, said it was a challenge to portray Cleopatra’s full range of emotions.
“She goes from being in love to deciding at the end that the best course of action is to kill herself,” she says.
“It is one of Shakespeare’s later plays and with maturity comes complexity.”
• Antony and Cleopatra will be performed in in Hampstead Parish Church, Church Row, NW3, on July 8-9 at 7.30pm, and July 10 at 2.30pm and 7.30pm (tickets £10, concs £8). Call 020 7482 1650 for information or book online at church.org.uk/tickets