Harriet Walter on Antony and Cleopatra: 'You have to play it fast or it falls apart' | Stage | The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/04/harriet-walter-on-antony-and-cleopatra-shakespeare-400-anniversary-interview

Harriet Walter on Antony and Cleopatra: 'You have to play it fast or it falls apart'

In a new series to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, leading actors, directors, designers and others offer their own guides to his plays. Harriet Walter starts off with a tragedy that demands to be performed at speed

‘She’s mercurial’ … Harriet Walter as Cleopatra in 2006. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

’m not sure I really wanted to play Cleopatra, at least at first. I thought of her as a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Mata Hari – the most beautiful woman in history, this sexy siren figure who could wrap the world’s most powerful men around her little finger. Everyone in the play falls in love with her. I didn’t think I could do that, to be honest.

When I started to get more interested, a few years before I played her at the RSC in 2006, I realised that she’s much more fascinating than that. She’s an extraordinarily intelligent, intense woman, a complex character who uses her sexuality as a political weapon. I decided I was going to play Cleopatra as someone with a brain. She’s kept Egypt, this tiny country, in a balance of power with the almighty Roman empire, and she’s done it through force of personality. In fact the play contains very few references to what she really looks like; it’s all about the effect she has on stage.

Addicted to love … Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter in Antony and Cleopatra at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Nowadays we have a very visual culture, but the Elizabethans and Jacobeans listened intensely. The language is always powerful in Shakespeare, but with Antony and Cleopatra the speeches are so big and muscular and rich – exhausting to speak, actually. I’d have to take these big lungfuls of air. And that fits the theme of the play: Antony and Cleopatra seem totally aware of their stature on the world stage. When Patrick Stewart and I got into rehearsals, we just bounced off each other with the energy of it.

But it’s a hard one to do. There are a huge number of scenes, and the action jumps between Rome and Egypt; one second you’re in one place, then you’re back again. Our production was in the Swan theatre, in Stratford-upon-Avon, which isn’t a big space and there was very little scenery, so we could move quickly. Gregory Doran, who was directing, pointed out that with these jump cuts between scenes it’s almost like a movie. You have to do it very fast, I think, or it starts to fall apart.

I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare over the years. You start to realise how the plays fit together; he’s always using pieces from one and slotting them into others. In some ways, Antony and Cleopatra are what would happen if Romeo and Juliet had lived happily ever after – except perhaps it wouldn’t be so happy. Cleopatra and Antony are in middle age, but they behave like teenagers, having these silly little spats; it’s almost as if they’re addicted to their own love affair. Cleopatra reminds me of Imogen in Cymbeline, too, and she also has bits of Cressida. It’s as if Shakespeare stirs all these personalities into a single character. Enobarbus, Antony’s closest companion, talks about her “infinite variety”. She’s mercurial; she changes every time you see her.

Harriet Walter: On the Donmar stage, all Shakespeare's players are women

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As a female actor, you feel sometimes that Shakespeare isn’t very interested in older women: the female characters are primarily young, the love interest or there to have children. Of course, that’s partly because he was writing for teenage boys; I’d give my eye teeth to see how the Elizabethans actually did it.

Normally at the end of a Shakespeare play the men are properly sweating, while the women just glow. I’ve recently been playing Henry IV in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production in New York, and there’s nothing that compares to those big male roles: not just the number of lines, but also the range of what you’re asked to do. But Cleopatra is the closest I’ve come. She feels believable: the stabs of jealousy she has when Antony marries someone else; the way she worries about her powers waning, and what will happen to her country and to her after she’s gone. Cleopatra was exhausting to play, but also completely exhilarating. She creates her own energy.