My Shakespeare

Episode
Antony and Cleopatra
Broadcast Info
2014 (44 mins)
Description
Kim Cattrall has played the role of Cleopatra twice and meets others who have as well - like Janet Suzman who is renowned for her performance with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Together, they begin to uncover the truth behind Shakespeare’s love story. Cattrall also travels to Rome and examines possible inspirations for the play. Contributors include Harriet Walter and Vanessa Redgrav.
200 years ago, two of the most powerful people in the world met and fell in love

Kim has played Cleopatra twice and now revisits the role an the real character of the great Queen of Egypt. She travels to Rome to see Antony’s city and to visit an exhibition devoted to his lover Cleopatra.

She also meets with her director Dame Janet Suzman who herself made an iconic Cleopatra back at the RSC in the 1970s. Together they begin to uncover the truth behind this astonishing love story. Once again there are parallels to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but Antony & Cleopatra are no lovesick juveniles, they are mature and heroic and real political figures. As such they were quite dangerous roles to write, let alone to play

Kim examines why Shakespeare wrote the play and uncovers that sometime he was so slavishly following his source material, he might be accused of plagiarism. But Shakespeare was a great poet and we act out how he might have adapted his source line by line in one of the most famous speeches in the entire play.

During the film, Kim watches performances from many different Cleopatras and she meets other actors who have played the role Harriet Walter, Vanessa Redgrave, Janet Suzman and joins actors rehearsing the role at the Globe. It is one of the greatest and longest of all Shakespeare’s female roles and must have required a boy actor of extraordinary skill to play the part. We look back at Antony’s first appearance in Shakespeare as a young and powerful figure in the play Julius Caesar, while Richard Johnson and Patrick Stewart talk about what it is like to play Cleopatra’s now aging lover Antony in the later play

Finally the inevitable conflict between the public and private lives of these two hugely important figures, was bound to end in conflict and tragedy. They seek to defeat or escape their rivals but they fail. As in Romeo and Juliet they both die by their own hands.

In the new candlelit indoor theatre created by the Globe a version of the indoor playhouse where we know this play was once performed, Kim watches as the actors play out Cleopatra’s last moments. She iconically commits suicide by forcing a poisonous snake to inflict its lethal embrace.
Genre
Literature; Writing

How to cite this record

The Open University, "My Shakespeare". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/85999 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)