Guest Blog: Jami Rogers Writes – Part One: Tarrell Alvin McCraney's Antony and Cleopatra at the RSC , 04/12/13, The bba shakespeare blog

December 04, 2013

Guest Blog: Jami Rogers Writes – Part One: Tarrell Alvin McCraney's Antony and Cleopatra at the RSC

Race plays an important role in Tarrell Alvin McCraney's production of Antony and Cleopatra at the RSC – an important but a surprisingly subtle and sometimes contradictory one. McCraney is an actor, director and playwright whose career has been nurtured a large extent by British theatre with his major plays produced at the Young Vic and the Royal Court (and one far less successful play for the RSC). McCraney's best plays have been those that have interrogated the African American experience through thought-provoking multiple lenses. The Brothers Size and In the Red and Brown Water premiered at the Young Vic in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an event that sent shock waves through America as the fissure between black and white were made evident once again. Choir Boy – a Royal Court and Lincoln Center co-production – movingly examined what it felt like to be both black and gay in a prestigious New England boarding school.

McCraney's work is infused with what Michael Billington has described as "mythic simplicity" and The Brothers Size and In the Red and Brown Water drew on Yoruba traditions, which infused his work with a mixture of realism and ritual. The impact of The Brothers Size lay in the combination of its formal language, its simple staging without décor, and the pure physicality of the performances that focused on characters and situations without distraction in the production at the Young Vic made it an intense and rewarding experience. At the play's core is an encounter by African Americans with law enforcement – a racially charged event in contemporary experience – which added layers of complexity in what was otherwise a family drama. Choir Boy is a play that investigates the cultural de-humanisation of groups of people, especially along racial and sexual orientation lines with black students in the all black private school now segregating their own. Significantly, the play takes place as the school prepares for its 50^th anniversary – more than a nod to the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech that was then only a year in the future when Choir Boy premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012. Choir Boy takes an incisive and painful look at how far America has swerved from the road trod by King in 1963.

My point in drawing out McCraney's writing is to hint at (as it is impossible to fully illustrate in a blog post) this body of work that draws heavily on myths yet simultaneously expresses the fissure in America (and, frankly, Britain) that breaks along racial lines – sometimes in gut-wrenching and visceral ways. The mythic status of the characters of Antony and Cleopatra may be what attracted McCraney to the play, perhaps seeing in these characters with larger than life reputations another way to explore the themes that have peppered his work. In fact, it began with a naked Cleopatra, walking through the pool of water upstage against the back of the Swan's wall and then sitting along its edge, wailing.

Given McCraney's body of work and the production's status as a co-production with two American companies and its purported setting as Haiti before the revolution, Antony and Cleopatra felt very British. The cast was half- British and half-American, but only once did an American accent come out of any of their mouths; the rest of the time the Americans adopted Received Pronunciation or – in the case of the Egyptians – Haitian or African accents. The style was often very reserved as well, with actors maintaining and upright posture and very clear verse-speaking (or as I prefer to call it, communicating the verse to the audience). There was little – or no – American exuberance (known often in these parts as being 'loud') and it was almost static in terms of movement (or 'statuesque' as is said of some defenders in British football who are completely still as the ball whizzes past them and into the back of the net).

Yet for all its seeming Britishness in style, elements of it were also very American. Most notably, perhaps, was what Enobarbus (who frequently acted as narrator in McCraney's script) termed as "An Interlude: Caesar's Triumph". Caesar's triumph was one that in no uncertain terms was directly corresponding to the slave trade. One character was paraded around the stage – bound by a single rope that intertwined her neck, wrists and her owner – and whipped. Pompey then had his throat ceremoniously cut as Caesar looked on, wearing his gold garland on his head. While this non-verbal addition was layered with the painful (largely American) stigma of slavery on a date when I saw it that was very nearly the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, one of my British friends was extremely frustrated by the slavery imagery. 'Why?', she asked (the Americans got it immediately).

I think that answer to that 'Why?' lies both in McCraney's interests and in the audiences who will encounter the production next in Miami and New York. What McCraney's casting did was to primarily separate Romans and Egyptians along racial lines. Cleopatra and her entourage were black or mixed race while the Romans were English, dressed to represent the Napoleonic French as a nod to the Haitian setting (and rather than ignore it because we should be well past noticing or caring, but since we aren't it's worth noting that this was the first black actress to play Cleopatra on an RSC stage). The racial lines were drawn in ways that would probably shock Joseph Papp, who truly believed in colorblind casting, casting on merit with the best actor given the role purely on ability no matter if they were Blue or Gray. Somewhat counter-intuitively, this was the crucial difference in using race as cultural situator between McCraney's British-American production and recent British attempts at equality.

Many theatre companies have found ways to include more ethnic minority actors in their Shakespearean casts, making the process more equitable. This has sometimes taken the form of setting the plays in "foreign" locales (i.e., not recognizably heritage-infused white English country houses of period drama), sometimes with all black or all Asian casts, at other times with the demarcation along lines that show feuds in terms of race (as easily done in more than one Romeo and Juliet). This approach has often led to ethnic minority actors being re-"Other"-ized by forcing them to adopt African or Asian accents rather than allowing British-born actors to speak in their natural accents like their white contemporaries do. True, on one hand McCraney's Antony and Cleopatra was making Cleopatra and her fellow countrymen and women "other" in speech (the African/Haitian accents) and deed (with what I assume to be voodoo rituals introduced towards the end of the production). Yet the insertion of the slavery motif in what was in actual fact a very brief vignette highlighted the fact that Rome was there to conquer Egypt – the white man was colonizing Africa (or Haiti) once again. In this light, there was a kind of quiet dignity to Cleopatra's refusal to capitulate to the conquering Caesar and in her death she set her people free. What McCraney did – and perhaps was only able to achieve because of the interests clearly inherent in his own playwriting – was to infuse the Africans with pride in their culture. This Antony and Cleopatra was not celebrating Mark Antony's triumphs (rightly as he loses frequently in the play); instead McCraney's production celebrated Cleopatra. The vision of the black character in chains in the "Interlude" is juxtaposed with the spiritually free Cleopatra who chooses death rather than submission to the colonial invader. Freedom versus slavery, a very strong pull still in McCraney's America.

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Most recently, Dr. Jami Rogers was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton in the Drama Department. She trained at LAMDA and holds an MA and a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham. Prior to obtaining her PhD, she spent 10 years working in public broadcasting in the US including 8 years at PBS's flagship programmes, Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!. She regularly publishes on the contemporary performance of Shakespeare's plays, including recent articles in Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare: the Journal of the British Shakespeare Association. She has taught in Birmingham, London, Preston and Bolton and performed in professional productions in Washington, D.C. and Boston. She has lectured on Shakespeare and American drama at the National Theatre in London and works regularly with David Thacker at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton.