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THEATRE
Antony and Cleopatra
Venue: Maynardville Open-Air Theatre, Wynberg. Tel: (021)
421 7695
Time: Mon & Tue @ 7:45pm, Wed - Sat @ 8:15pm
Price: R100 - R150
Performances: 12 Jan - 20 Feb 2010
Genre: Drama
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Antony and Cleopatra, one of
Shakespeare’s better known tragedies, opens the 55th Shakespeare season at
Maynardville Open-Air Theatre on January 16, 2010.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a play of epic proportions. Spanning
a ten year period of high drama and politics and covering most of the
Mediterranean world, Antony and Cleopatra is considered not only
Shakespeare’s most luxuriant tragedy, but was written by the poet at the
height of his literary powers and gives rise to some of his most sensual
poetry.
For
centuries the tale of the very attractive Cleopatra, last Queen of Egypt,
and her adulterous affair with the Roman hero Mark Antony, has captured
the imagination and has given rise to a multitude of plays, films and
books, but seldom with as much bristling sexuality and insight into the
workings of love and politics between male and female, desire and duty,
the bed and the battlefield, emotion and reason and between age and youth
as in this complex work by Shakespeare.
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Cleopatra is without a doubt
Shakespeare’s most complex female character. Apart from being a mother,
wife, lover and ruler of a country with an extraordinary and refined
culture and a history spanning three millennia, she, unlike Mark Antony,
torn between pleasure and duty, is an astute commentator on life.
Intensely aware of herself as a player on the global stage, her sheer
unpredictability of behaviour gives the play the syncopated rhythm of a
thriller.
The two lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, may be world leaders,
but they are also, after all, only human beings—flawed and ageing ones at
that. As human beings they share their mortality, jealousy, love, shame,
and insecurity. Despite their historical grandeur and thanks to
Shakespeare's sensitive portrayal of them, Antony and Cleopatra are no
more—and no less—extraordinary than we are.
Antony and Cleopatra is directed and
designed by Marthinus Basson; starring an award winning cast - Tinarie van
Wyk Loots (Cleopatra), André Weideman (Antony), Caesar (Andrew Laubscher),
Eros (Clyde Berning), Sextus Pompius, a rebel (Nick Pauling) with a full
cast.
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