So what I thought I was seeing was Noel Coward, maybe Private Lives. I mean it is a perfectly legitimate, if slightly unrewarding reading – Antony and Cleopatra ‘lite’, that's all. And that is what they chose to do, and it was completely consistent. They decided to skate over the story in a sort of pretty way, in a Hollywood way, I would say because she was very glamorous and he was very Antonine. I thought there were the embryos of some really good performances there, actually. I was much taken by the young man who plays the messenger, and the actor playing Eros and Thidias. They actually squeezed feeling out of those very cut parts. I think the two protagonists rather relied on their leading lady–leading man star power back home to carry them and obviously there were many people in the audience who recognized them and loved them. And they were both very, very fetching; indeed, there is no question about that (see Colour Plate 13).

She had found the actress Cleopatra, so she kept doing her asphyxiating act, her ‘I can't breathe’ act, but the production missed the motivations of why she does that, what mockery she is using on Antony, which is to do with lying and play-acting. She emulates a bad actress since she is trying to point out to Antony that he is a bad actor in the matter of grief. They had clearly decided, since there is great intelligence behind it, that she was a picture-book Cleopatra, but what she didn't have was power and the fear of an autocrat. She didn't have any vulnerability at all, so she didn't allow you into her worst excesses. It was just like, ‘She does that every day and so she will go on doing it.’ Similarly, I think they cut short Antony's inner life, really crucially badly, and branded him a clown, a joke figure with a strange white hat. I didn't quite see what they were getting at, because it was imposed rather than enacted. I didn't feel that intense assumption of a drama which you have to feel when an actor walks into that space and then tells us a story. You didn't have any of the terrible turmoil, Antony makes one bad decision after another throughout the play from the moment he handles Cleopatra rather badly by not grieving for Fulvia.