THEATER CHRONICLE
223
Briton comedy at that point, never having graduated to much subtlety
of humor about the English. And the sets and trappings, some of them
the same as for next night's Shakespeare, seem in connection with Shaw
more on the side of
Aida.
One thinks of his own remark about the Sphinx,
"which I have always conceived as something faked up with a clothes
horse and a mangle." He did remark too that it would cost a good deal
to dress the play, but perhaps Olivier could have spent just as much on
colors and textures not sO distractingly lavish. Vivien Leigh makes a
rather better juvenile than older Cleopatra but fails to persuade one of
her descent from the Nile; there is a touch of Gigi in both her portray–
als, more courtesan than queen, and not much Egypt.
It is distressing. Nobody wants to think of this handsome gifted couple
as just another contempo-success story. But it is mystifying to be given
such large areas of emptiness in these two great versions of Rome and
Cleopatra, considering the obvious thoughtfulness, care and high talent
in all departments except music that have gone into the joint production.
Robert Helpmann, for one, is as good a volatile Apollodorus as in–
scrutable symbol of the cool march of history in the person of Octavius;
and there are several scenes, such as the meeting of the triumvirs in
Rome, with its difficult problem of static grouping, that could hardly
have been done better. There are also scenes, more in Shakespeare, that
are unspoilable: Cleopatra's with the messenger, and, almost, her
death, which unless the principal were hideous could scarcely fail as a
tableau and is a triumphant one in this case; all that hurts it is a
curious affectation of speech that Miss Leigh falls into in lieu of
growing inner majesty in the last act, most noticeably in four-syllable
tion words-re-so-Iu-tion.
It is the innerness, which is to say the
coherence, of the whole in both cases that is missing and that seems to
have been almost deliberately sacrificed to a
show,
and this was not true
of Olivier's performances here a few years ago. Antony cracks like a
clay pipe at Actium and from then on is a grotesque of a broken
man or rather is simply Olivier, playing at certain moments more a
Justice Shallow than the tragic hero he is, caught in the bite of self
and world that is the Shakespearean dialectic of doom. Enobarbus, his
vital philosophic adjunct, seems little more than a well-played military
one; Menas,
his
adjunct, might as well have skipped his stunning offer
to Pompey to rid the world of all three triumvirs. And so on.
But more illuminating than detail is perhaps the simple question
of why, for what conceivable reason except
show,
these two Cleopatras
should have been presented together. The only possible justification, a
slim one, would have been to play up their differences, which are more
