Antony and Cleopatra

by Carol Chillington Rutter

Overview

This book writes a performance history of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most ambiguous play, from 1606 to the present. It observes the choices that actors, directors, designers, musicians and adapters have made each time they have brought the play’s thoughts on power, race, masculinity, regime change, exoticism, love, dotage and delinquency into alignment with a new present. Informed by close attention to theatre records – promptbooks, stage managers’ reports, reviews – it offers in-depth analyses of fifteen international productions by (among others) the Royal Shakespeare Company, Citizens Theatre Glasgow, Northern Broadsides, Berliner Ensemble and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. It ends seeing Shakespeare’s black Egyptian Queen Cleopatra – whited-out in performance for centuries – restored to the contemporary stage. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will be of interest to students, academics, actors, directors and general readers alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526194701
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	01/20/2026
Series:	Shakespeare in Performance
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carol Chillington Rutter is Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick

Table of Contents

Introduction: A play that ‘approves the common liar’
1 ‘That time? O times!’: The Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra
2 ‘Famous patterns of unlawful love’: Antony and Cleopatra, 1677–1931
3 ‘Wogs exit nearest way’: Glen Byam Shaw, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1953
4 ‘By certain scales i’th’ pyramid’: Taking the Measure of Antony and Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Company 1972, 1978, 1982
5 Boying Greatness: The Citizens’ Theatre (Glasgow), 1972 and Northern Broadsides (Halifax), 1995
6 ‘Back to Basics’: Peter Hall, Olivier Theatre, National Theatre 1987
7 ‘Some Squeaking Cleopatra’: Shakespeare’s Globe, 1999
8 Estranging the crocodile: Foreign Antony and Cleopatra in Britain and abroad
9 Restoring blackness: Josette Bushell-Mingo’s Cleopatra, Royal Exchange Manchester (2005); Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ‘Radical Edit’, RST, The Public, and GableStage (2013)

Cast lists
Bibliography