Old Play in Manhattan

Antony and Cleopatra (by William Shakespeare; produced by Katharine Cornell) is one of the world's greatest plays and the theater's greatest problems. It does far more than celebrate one of the most famous of all love affairs; more even than trace the downfall of one of the most powerful figures of history through his dalliance with one of the most passionate. Antony and Cleopatra is a swarming and forever-shifting chronicle of conspiracies and conquests, of realms and empires. In amplitude, it is a kind of War and Peace among plays; and the knotty problem is how to achieve complexity without congestion, and commodiousness without sprawl.

The actress who plays Cleopatra has a knotty problem too: she has to seem the very breath of passion without having any real chance to be passionate. Because the Cleopatra of Shakespeare's day had to be acted by a boy, she and Antony are permitted no high love scenes. No wonder the Cleopatras on Broadway have not been many, and have not been memorable.*

No wonder, either, that last week's opening had most Broadway critics not just tossing their hats in the air but completely losing their heads. For this Antony is so much better than Broadway's burnt veterans dared expect that they could be excused for thinking it better than it is. It is good; but it has limitations and even weaknesses. It exhibits almost every grade of acting. It could sometimes be grander, and sometimes more exciting; and it could many times do better by Shakespeare's language.

But there is little sprawl and no congestion, and things turn dull only where Shakespeare himself has let history nose out drama. Moreover, under Guthrie McClintic's perceptive direction, this Antony and Cleopatra properly brims over with worldliness, cynical wit, self-seeking and double-dealing.

Katharine Cornell is competent and lively as Cleopatra, but hardly right: she seems conscientiously rather than constitutionally wily and sluttish. Marc Antony is played by English Actor Godfrey Tearle (whose close resemblance to F.D.R. won him the role of the U.S. wartime President in MGM's atom-bomb movie, The Beginning or the End). As the ablest Roman of them all brought low by middle-aged lust, Tearle is brilliantly effective.

* Last Antony and Cleopatra, in 1937, ran for five performances, was greeted by Critic John Mason Brown: "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra--and sank."

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