In this fascinating, bilingual, partially successful staging of Shakespeare’s play, the Romans predominantly speak verse while the Egyptians are played by Deaf actors who mostly use British Sign Language. Swivel-eyed culture warriors will undoubtedly call it ‘woke’.
But how great is it that London audiences, Deaf and hearing, can experience the eloquent physical expressiveness of Nadia Nadarajah’s imperious Cleopatra in a 1500-capacity venue and feel they could hear a pin drop? Indeed, her signing of the “immortal longings” speech, presaging Cleopatra’s suicide, eerily coincided on opening night with St Paul’s softly striking 10pm over the river.
To have brought something so bold and complex to the stage at all is a technical triumph for director Blanche McIntyre. Her production captures granular relationships but misses the big picture. John Hollingworth’s Antony catches Cleopatra’s attention with a stamp of his foot and the scenes where he signs to her have the intimacy of a lover communicating in his second language. On the line “dost thou hear lady?” he points to his eyes.
The differences in the two languages plays into a gendered division of cultures: signing is “foreign”, feminine and sensual; speech European, masculine and warlike.
Even so, the spoken scenes lack emotional urgency, swamped by a chest-thumping, arm-clasping default blokiness. It feels more like we’re watching a soap opera about warring families and domestic romantic upheavals than a grand passion played out against a clash of empires. Then again, maybe that’s how Elizabethan audiences experienced it too.
Though classed as a tragedy the play is full of comedy. The story features a ridiculous number of reversals, betrayals and epic misunderstandings. Randy Antony is a noble Roman too easily led by his membrum virile. Cleopatra is a drama queen who attains grandeur in defeat and death. Her jealous interrogation of a “saucy eunuch” about a rival’s appearance plays out like one of Benny Hill’s wordless comic sequences, only with brass instruments and ancient horns – stop sniggering at the back – on the score rather than saxophones.
The stage is dressed in blue canvas framing a central, red sun on which the surtitled dialogue unscrolls and where, at the end, a silhouette of the Egyptian god Anubis looms. The costumes look like they were borrowed from an amdram company in Cheam. The whole thing is a mishmash of the thrillingly radical and the ridiculous.
But it’s a real pleasure to see Nadarajah, previously so startling in supporting roles at the Globe, grapple with and subdue the most grand and absurd of Shakespeare’s heroines. And to see sign language step from the side of the stage to the centre.
It was also a delight for me to sit among a large number of Deaf audience members, animatedly but quietly signing throughout, who raised their hands in “silent clapping” amid the rapturous applause at the end.
