It is a well-known legend. Plutarch wrote about it in his Parallel Lives, Shakespeare turned it into a tragedy, Mankiewicz into a cinematic masterpiece. The year is 41 B.C., a republican general has just been given the eastern half of the Roman world to rule when, anxious to safeguard her people's independence, a young Egyptian queen goes to meet him in a gilded ship, surrounded by a crew disguised as nymphs. Their relationship will last ten years, or perhaps is it still going on... How then can you tell a story whose every detail is already known? “By telling the story:” Tiago Rodrigues's answer isn't ironic posturing, it is at the very root of his theatre. If the Lisbon director refuses to give in to “the monumentality of Antony and Cleopatra,” it is to allow us to watch his dancer-actors, Vítor Roriz and Sofia Dias, as through their own breathing they approach the tragic knot of this intimate and political relationship. So that we can watch, all together, how it enters our present. To do so, he has composed, on the very bodies of his performers, a vast cosmogonic poem that requires us to dive deep into the eyes of the other, at the risk of losing what makes us an audience: our belief in the illusion of the theatre.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Myths are forever being modernised. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch sees the story of the queen of Egypt, heiress of Hellenistic culture, only through the lens of her official relationship with Rome. By opening his tragedy with “Nay, but...”, Shakespeare focuses on the political discords that plague his own century. As for Joseph mankiewicz, he finds in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton a way to put the passion of Hollywood at the service of this story of epic love. All three are there, implicitly, in Tiago Rodrigues's play. But his third song, which speaks of the failure of the imperialistic diplomacy of the Roman republic, is an original approach: the desire for efficiency of our productivist societies forever reduces the number of spaces where we can take the risk to meet the other.
Distribution
Text Tiago Rodrigues
With quotation of Antoine et Cléopâtre after William Shakespeare
Direction Tiago Rodrigues
music extract from the soundtrack of the movie Cléopâtre (1963), composed by Alex North
Translation from portuguese Thomas Resendes
Scenography Ângela Rocha
Light Nuno Meira
Sound Miguel Lima, Sérgio Milhano (Ponto Zurca)
Costume Ângela Rocha, Magda Bizarro
Artistic collaboration Maria João Serrão, Thomas Walgrave, Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes
Surtitles Rita Mendes
With
Sofia Dias Cléopâtre
Vítor Roriz Antoine
Production
Production Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Mundo Perfeito
Coproduction Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbonne), Centro Cultural Vila Flôr, Temps d'images
With the support of Governo de Portugal | DGArtes and du Museu da Marinha
Residences at Teatro do Campo Alegre, Teatro Nacional São João, Alkantara