Antony & Cleopatra

Blakely is miscast as Antony, but James' Enobarbus makes up for Blakely's defects.

Starring Jane Lapotaire and Colin Blakely, this BBC production looked unconventional from the start, with the willowy Lapotaire proving an able Queen of Egypt to the squat and rough soldier created by Blakely.

Little glamour here but excellent performances from the leads (plus Ian Charleson as Octavius Caesar and Emrys James as Enobarbus) and an intriguing array of supporting performers. Like all the BBC Shakespeares, this suffers from being a little stage-bound in its feel, a recorded performance rather than a tv drama, but within those confines remains an appealing and accessible work.

Those who have criticised the casting of Blakely have perhaps missed the point of Antony and Cleopatra (or taken too much notice of the glossy Taylor/Burton epic). Antony is first and foremost a soldier, and this is what attracts Cleopatra, not necessarily a physical attraction. This said, Jane Lapotaire puts a certain amount of passion in her portrayal of the Egyptian queen which works well. Although this version of the play has dated it remains in the top handful of the BBC complete Shakespeares.

The reputation of this performance is not good. The initial reviews were quite scathing. The competition from the Johnson/Suzman/Nunn version is decisive; the other version is better. However, there are many fine things about this video. Let's talk about them first.

Ian Charleson's Octavius Caesar is good, a schoolmaster with ice water in his veins. Many of the supporting players are quite fine. The almost completely blind Esmond Knight does a hilarious drunk scene as Lepidus, and Donald Sumpter gives Pompey a model reading.

The visuals are spare but more lushly colored than usual in the BBC series, giving a Mediterranean vividness to the whole show, even if lovers of spectacle will do better with the Taylor-Burton film.

Emrys James is less successful as Enobarbus. This part is generally considered actor-proof, but here James is charmless and without variation. His great speech describing Cleopatra's barge is completely ineffective. Whether the blame is his or the director's is lost to history, but I'm betting on Jonathan Miller's expressed annoyance with "tired" tradition.

However the real problem is with the two title characters. It's as if you'd gone to the theater, settled in your seat, and then heard an announcement that owing to the leads' illness, the actor playing Enobarbus would instead be playing Antony, and the actress playing Charmian would take on the role of Cleopatra.

Colin Blakely was a bright spot in many fine films during his career, but they were usually other peoples' films. Here he understands the character well enough and gives a good performance. He plays all the right notes, but he himself is the wrong instrument. He's simply not an Antony.

Jane Lapotaire is a bigger problem. Her portrayal of Cleopatra is small to the point of cramped, mechanical, calculating, and self-obsessed. A shopgirl's idea of a queen, she never strikes a single true note. In the first half of the play, she's merely wrong. In the second half she becomes an active trial for the viewer. When Antony is finally dead, instead of rising to greatness in understanding, she shrinks into dreary, unspontaneous hysteria. This is one Cleopatra who learns nothing from her experience. While she goes on and on shrieking and weeping, you wind up urging the snake to get on with it.

So it's not an out and out disaster, but with the poor casting of the two leads, the show never quite pulls itself together. Turn your attention immediately to the RSC version with Johnson and Suzman, and don't look back.

Shakespeare's great play Antony & Cleopatra (1981) (TV) was directed by Jonathan Miller for the BBC. As with all the BBC Shakespeare productions, this film attempts to give us Shakespeare's plays as we think people would have seen them in Shakespeare's time. Costumes are excellent, but props are sparse and we don't ever see a cast of thousands.

The lovely Jane Lapotaire plays Cleopatra--whether childish or, later, older and wiser--in a direct and excellent fashion. Colin Blakely makes a fine Antony. However, in my opinion, Ian Charleson. as Octavius Caesar, gets the acting honors. I think that Charleson acts the part exactly the way it was written. In essence, he is telling us that Antony is ruled by his heart, but he, Caesar, is ruled by his head. Ultimately, of course, Octavius Caesar prevails in the play, as he did in history.

I enjoy the BBC Shakespeare movies because we don't have to accept a director's "concept" of what he or she wants to do with the play. It isn't shown in modern times, with automatic rifles instead of swords, it isn't shown with huge armies or navies doing battle. It's essentially a stage play, adapted very well for the small or large screen.

I have studied Shakespeare on film, so I have a standard of comparison based on what I have seen from non-BBC productions. If you want leaps of creativity, and the director's thoughts about how Antony would look as a World War II general, look elsewhere. If you want to see the play based on the text, look at the BBC production.

P.S. As I write this review, this movie has a horribly low IMDb rating of 6.1. It's much better than that. Find it and see it. It was made for the small screen, so, obviously, will work well on DVD.

First of all, those who have never seen this play, when they first view this film, will be puzzled that the play has been updated to Shakespeare's time. The clothing is definitely from the Elizabethan period. And that's the only interesting part.

After watching this film for about 15 minutes, I couldn't continue watching. It was so boring! It seems that the director is expecting the lines of the play to make the play interesting! I know it sounds bizarre, what I just wrote. But it's not just the lines of the actors that makes the movie, it has to have action! There was little action in this film, the actors kind of stood around and said their lines.

Jane Lapotoire was not bad as Cleopatra, she was the only one that seems to make sense. You can feel her Cleopatra as being frivolous and madly in love, or is it in lust, with Antony. The actor that plays Antony, alas, looked like an ugly old guy with a beard. What does the dainty, pretty Cleopatra see in this guy?

I didn't believe anything in this film. I am not a student of Shakespeare, like most people, I don't understand all the lines of a Shakespeare play, I rely on both action and words to understand the play. This film had precious little action and this is what makes the film fail. This film is just too static.

I give this Antony & Cleopatra version a "D-".