Key notes on modern productions AO5

Summary of key points:

Iqbal Kahn's 2017 Production

• Cleo is an African American woman - challenges earlier Orientalist/exotic depictions

• She's also a mature woman, older

  • She strips to nothing before putting on her robe and crown

  • Mocks Caesar in an affected baby voice

  • 'queen and jester'

• Stagecraft:

  • Sea battle has comical oversized model boats

  • Egypt very stylised with dance and ritual, Egyptian dancers wearing masks

• Music:

  • Rolling drums, reedy squeaks, erotic twangs and shimmering gongs

Michael Boyd's 2010 Production

• Modern dress and staging

• Antony changes to looser styles in relation to his crumbling Roman values

Blanche McIntyre's 2024 BSL Production

• Captions appear on screens

  • Different fonts for Egyptians and Romans

  • When a character dies their words on screen crumble and fade away

• Language as a cultural division - a vivid physical representation of the divide

Gregory Doran's 2007 Production

• Cleopatra is a significantly older woman (she died at 39 so this is more accurate than a young boy playing her in Jacobean times)

  • Harder to combine her contradictory qualities of childishness/impetuousness

  • But Antony is also significantly older, Cleopatra is looking up to him - creates an interesting power dynamic