Watching Lionel Messi run with a ball is no different from listening to Marc Destrubé play the violin or watching Evelyn Hart in Prokovief’s Romeo and Juliet. They are all examples of virtuosity. All this came to mind several times today and Saturday night in what has really been a perfect Father’s Day. Virtuosity seemed to be before my eyes for most of it.
It all began over a month ago with the chance turning on of my TV to the Turner Classic’s Movie channel. What I saw from beginning to end was Gabriel Pascal’s (Pygmalion, 1938) Caesar and Cleopatra and unlikely film (Technicolor) made just before the Battle of Britain. It featured Claude Rains (John Gielgud was to have been Caesar but Gielgud took an instant dislike to the director which in my opinion was a fortuitous occurrence which made the film much more fun). The film has Vivien Leigh playing a spoiled teenager (she looks younger than she did in Gone With the Wind) playing against Claude Rains as an extremely funny but wise and old Caesar. As the dialogue delighted me I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a 89 year-old George Bernard Shaw had re-written his play and was given credit for the screenplay. After watching this delightful film I felt that I could never ever see (and I have never seen it) Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison (as Caesar) and Richard Burton as Antony. The sets were sumptuous and the film featured an extremely handsome and young Stewart Granger who plays the Persian carpet merchant (carpets, Cleopatra, get it?).
Yesterday evening Rosemary and I attended the Bard on the Beach opening performance of Antony and Cleopatra. We, of course did not go without first reading Harold Bloom’s take on the play from his Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human. It seems that Shakespeare wrote three four plays in a row from 1604 to 1606, in 14 consecutive months. These were Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Bloom suspects that even William Shakespeare would burn out after such and undertaking.
“I am the most Bardolatrous of critics and yet even I find that after Antony’s collapse and Cleopatra’s apotheosis, Shakespeare was wary of further quests into the interior.”
Bloom further opines:
“Cleopatra, indisputably the peer of Falstaff and of Hamlet, is the most vital woman in Shakespeare, surpassing even Rosalind [As You Like It].”
I could add that coincidentally since Bard on the Beach is also featuring Much Ado About Nothing, that the female protagonist Beatrice is a close second to Rosalind and Cleopatra. What is most interesting (and more later this week) is the fact that Jennifer Lines is playing both parts, that of Cleopatra and that of Beatrice at the moment!
As Rosemary and I watched the play and a woman in front of me with supersensitive ears objected to my munching my official Bard on the Beach caramel pop-corn, I wondered how much of what we think we know about historical characters is really based on theatre and films and so little on fact.
After the most satisfying performance I decided that as soon as I got home I would research my home library and find out. I was surprised to find out that the Cleopatra who has herself rolled up in a carpet is pure Bernard Shaw while Shakespeare’s fishing quote by Cleopatra (Cleopatra could fish?):
"My bended hook shall piece/Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up/I’ll think them every one an Antony,/And say ‘Ah ha, you’re caught!"
In Plutarch, Antony. in The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, John Dryden and Arthur H. Clough, tr. and ed., vol. 3 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1902)
However, the Alexandrians in general liked it all well enough, and joined good-humouredly and kindly in his frolic and play, saying they were much obliged to Antony for acting his tragic parts at Rome, and keeping comedy for them. It would be trifling without end to be particular in his follies, but his fishing must not be forgotten. He went out one day to angle with Cleopatra, and, being so unfortunate as to catch nothing in the presence of his mistress, he gave secret orders to the fishermen to dive under water, and put fishes that had been already taken upon his hooks; and these he drew so fast that the Egyptian perceived it. But, feigning great admiration, she told everybody how dexterous Antony was, and invited them next day to come and see him again. So, when a number of them had come on board the fishing-boats, as soon as he had let down his hook, one of her servants was beforehand with his divers and fixed upon his hook a salted fish from Pontus. Antony, feeling his line give, drew up the prey, and when, as may be imagined, great laughter ensued, "Leave," said Cleopatra, "the fishing-rod, general, to us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus; your game is cities, provinces, and kingdoms."
This morning brought and invitation from Robert to watch Brazil demolish the Ivory Coast on his extra large and extra flat and thin TV. We (Rosemary and Rebecca and I ) were to go to the annual Vancouver Rose Society Rose Show at the Floral Hall at VanDusen. Rebecca showed up at noon to bid me to take her and Rosemary to the show. Robert invited her in and she was soon glued with us to watch the game. She surprised Robert with her knowledge of the players playing. She then had a long chat with Robert’s wife Patricia on painting and how acrylics make it easier to fix mistakes. When we left (after the game finished) Patricia came along and at the floral hall Rebecca explained to Patricia all about roses and their botanical classification. I could not hide my pride on all this!
In the afternoon I puttered in the garden and took some medium format photographs of the garden. In the late afternoon I took the film to be processed at The Lab and when I was about to return home I stopped the car and called Rosemary on impulse. I told her I was going to buy some hot-dog buns and that she was to take out from the freezer our most favourite Angus beef hot-dogs. I was much too lazy to stop at Safeway so I stopped at a corner market on Oak and 16th not far from a DVD film rental place. It was there that I found the gem that finished off Father’s Day to my delight and to Rosemary’s.
I found a filmed stager version of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (staged at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival last year) with no less than Christopher Plummer as Caesar and a very young and very lively black woman, Nikki M. James as Cleopatra.
The Stratford version of the play is almost identical to the film I saw a month back. It had more dialogue and the Cleopatra here was much more believable as a young 16 year-old that grows in age and experience in contact with a Shaw Caesar who is much more the mentor and much less the lover that we think he might have been. This film dovetails perfectly with Bard on the Beach’s Antony and Cleopatra.
Rosemary was afraid that much of Shakespeare’s dialogue would escape her. Such is the terrific acting in the Bard on the Beach production that little of the dialogue is lost. At the very least the understanding is there and one can re-live the experience by reading the play at home. Rosemary is always wanting to sacrifice her entertainment by convincing me to take Rebecca in her stead. I told her that Rebecca would probably find Antony and Cleopatra a trifle boring and or simply difficult. Such a play could put her off.
But after seeing Plummer playing a wonderful and believable contemporary man who happens to be Julius Caesar and a Nikki M. James playing a teenager no different from Miley Cyrus, both talking in what is almost contemporary English I was glad I paid that extra dollar for a week’s rental. It is my hope that Rebecca will see it and enjoy it. She might then not refuse an invitation by her grandfather to take her to see Jennifer Lines play Cleopatra at Bard on the Beach.
As for me it seems that Plutarch's Live beckon. Shall I go to Macleod Books or the Vancouver Public Library?
