So I'm going to talk a little bit about my ideas of how I approached the play to
begin with.
And then I'm going to invite Hildegard and Michael to join the chat and share
their memories and experiences of this amazing process. Well,
Antony & Cleopatra was last staged at the National Theatre with Alan Rickman and
Helen Mirren about 20 years before we,
thought about our production and the idea of doing it came out of, in fact,
the dialogue that I had between myself and Ralph Fiennes.
I directed Ralph in Man and Superman at the National Theatre and he and I were
talking about what the next great part would be. And Ralph had actually
seen Anthony Hopkins play Antony for Peter Hall also in the Olivier,
where Judy Dench was Cleopatra and Ralph had always remembered that approach and
that performance and had been very curious about tackling Antony one day and we
thought maybe this was the moment to do it.
So we approached Sophie Okonedo and she agreed to be Cleopatra and then all the
rest of the company joined and off we went. Now of course the play is huge.
It has I think 40 scenes. It crosses continents, worlds. There were battles,
there's Egypt, there's Rome,
and it was a huge undertaking to work out how to make those worlds live.
One of the first things I did was to make a trip to Egypt and I had discovered
that the Egypt,
the real Egypt today is quite different from the Egypt in Shakespeare's
imagination. Yet it was good just being in the heat and the light and the sand.
And I took some photographs and I had some experiences and I took all those back
to see Hildegard and we started off our journey with some meetings.
But Hildegard, yeah. Where can you remember we started the problem?
What was our starting point as you recall it?
We started probably a year before we actually got on stage and it was quite a
long run in time.
We both had very busy diaries and one of the things I asked you and you had and
you agreed is that we could sort of meet,
irregularly regularly over this whole period and have conversations.
So the usual deadline,
wasn't applied to this job that we could have more dream time so to speak and we
could, we could, take it, without, pressure actually.
I suppose from the beginning as well, you also were very clear on contrasts.
That Egypt was earthy and in fact let us have a swimming pool in the end,
water. Then Rome was very much as I recalled marble. Is that right?
It's very, it's much colder. It was colder and it was,
it was closely related to power somehow,
I ended up with these objects on plinths, which
originally we thought were sort of trophy-like
art brought back, but in fact it became slightly more abstract.
But the material of the very pale,
almost white marble world of Rome was very contrasting with the colourful green
tiled water colour, costumes very different of course in Egypt.
And the heat and the dust is what we wanted to bring into it.
Michael so, if that was how we began our visual language and our journey.
Tell us, tell us a little bit about how,
how you felt embarking on how to find the music of Antony & Cleopatra.
Well, I think for me one of the things I've learned about that space,
of the Olivier,
is how vast it is and how epic and with the play with this sweep to it,
I felt like boldness in that space is sort of rewarded. I feel like you want to,
you want to really embrace the scale of it. So,
for me it was about how to fill, fill the space and sound,
and we have a five piece live band to play the score.
And so it was about how best to assign those roles.
And I decided quite early on that I thought percussion was a way to give us the
epic scale and it can be really interesting really dynamic and different with
worlds of Rome and Egypt.
And of course I got all those references that,
the visual references you had early on and we met before rehearsals started.
But as is normal on a play like this,
the music isn't written until the rehearsals are well underway.
So I'm very much in the rehearsal room trying to feel out where the production
is going with the actors and the different design departments and all the
technology that goes into it to try and work out where the music fits within the
palette of all those things that happen at once.
So yeah,
so for me it was about how to differentiate the worlds of Rome and Egypt. And,
I think Rome was quite clear to me.
It felt very sort of clinical and metric and quite military.
And so I sort of leant into, a Western percussion instruments,
a lot of snare drums, sort of really crisp and clean, quite cold sounds.
And then obviously we open up the world of Egypt.
And then what was great was I got the opportunity to work with this,
our musical director, Magnus Mehta,
who's an expert in loads of different percussion from all around the world,
but specifically the Middle East,
it's travelled lots to North Africa and studied lots of percussion instruments
in all of these different places and has a treasure trove of them in his house
and right at the beginning of rehearsals, I went around and he,
literally just pulled out instrument after instrument and said,
so this sounds like this and this rhythm is this.
And it was really great to be able to have someone with that knowledge to sort
of work with and collaborate through the process so that it wasn't, it was,
you know, he had a very big part, input,
into how all of it functioned in the end.
And Hildegard and Michael,
maybe we'll talk now about a couple of moments in the, in the show itself,
the combine music and set in a very particular way.
One of them was in the original text.
It's Pompey's ship a ship where they, Pompey,
who's one of the Roman generals has a party to celebrate a peace treaty between,
him and Antony and Caesar and they have a party and a dance and it's a kind of
bacchanalian scene on this deck of a boat. Hildegard, it was,
a challenging scene to work out.
Not least because a boat on stage is never easy,
particularly in the Olivier and particularly having to have this big dance and
this drama and a feeling of kind of, anarchy on it. So talk us,
talk us through your memories, Hildegard, of how we,
of how we got to what we did.
Having used half of a very large revolve,
most of the floor space in the first half of the play for Egypt.
We had this water world. We then
ran out of options. How,
in a way a boat would be suddenly coming from where and how.
So we knew that also that we wouldn't overdo,
this beautifully used in many productions,
this feature of the Olivier drum revolve where you could,
you could take scenery down or up.
It takes a couple of minutes I think.
And then that's the worry because you can't, if you're watching it,
you don't really want to stop the play to watch something technical happen.
But we had,
we had decided the boat would come up in one form or other cause it suits it
coming out of the ground coming, you know,
so from the depths of the sea,
the drum revolve and, and we,
we struggled with it because we were very literal about the need for the action,
you know, for the coming onto the deck, going up, being in this space,
having a rowdy party,
we wanted to create a space that allowed all that.
And I think I did throw out a very advanced sketch suddenly one day cause I
thought it'd be rather wonderful if,
if we could really surprise the arrival of the boat with a almost abstract shape
that would then do the trick of getting us into the belly of the ship.
And so it's like, it's like having a fin, a shark fin or something coming out.
It was in the end metal and it looked, it came around,
it allowed the drum revolve allowed it to come out rather spectacularly.
And people seem to remember the arrival.
Totally, I feel it's still with me in dreams Hildegard.
Actually, an abstract shape arriving and using the technology of the stage,
which essentially led us to it being a submarine.
And we never knew it was going to be a submarine. The music was fantastic,
you know,
in helping that become very heightened actually because the music helped that
transition so beautifully that when we did have actors come across the space,
lined up and got dressed, how was, how did the dressing go? I can't remember.
Or they got dressed into the
military kind of uniform,
which again Jonathan Goddard the great movement director helped us to do in such
a kind of deliberate,
and exciting way with Michael's music hopefully the audience never realised that
actually this was just covering a scene change,
but it was a sort of became a scene in its own right.
For me, in that middle of that, that dressing moment, there's a,
there's the bit that I'm actually really pleased with in hindsight,
watching it back. I mean, in the theatre,
that's the thing about music for plays. In the theatre,
it's one thing watching on the screen at home is wonderful,
but it doesn't quite give you that same, epic nature of the moment.
But there was a bit in the middle where they were dressing and I'd run out of
music. I knew I had to fill more time.
And I had these two percussionists play on opposite sides.
So you can't see them on the stage. They're on these side platforms.
So they're in view of the audience in the theatre.
And they were playing these snare drums, this sort of solo,
but it was a duet between these two drummers.
It was like a real moment of virtuosic
playing from them that really helped to catapult us into that next phase where
the ship was about to come up.
I was pleased because that was at the time written as a sort of cover and then I
went this, this feels like it's successful.
Well sometimes accidents pay off!
I did put to use of the Olivier,
which I hadn't seen before and it mattered to me that we didn't look up at the
lighting grid, that we didn't have this cavernous space that was also very high.
I wanted to have a sort of pressure lid on the whole production to scale it down
in a way, make it less operatic
What is brilliant Hildegard is that you also made it into a cinema screen,
in the sense that, it's hard to tell when you watch the video,
but the filming of it, you had created actually a black kind of
An angled piece went right across this whole space and it basically didn't show
you, it didn't show you where the lights were coming from.
And so, so you could kind of, I mean,
it was beautifully lit and very fast because there was an awful lot of scenes to
get through in the technical rehearsal. It was fantastic.
Well Hildegard and Michael, thank you.
And suddenly I am feeling enormous gratitude to both of you and indeed to the
whole creative team and to the extraordinary company of actors who came together
with such heroism and skill and collaboration to make a production of Antony and
Cleopatra, which inevitably with a play that size,
it's only done once in a generation.
And I'm so glad that we were all part of it and to work with both of you and
with everyone on, on making it function,
but I think people will really take something from.
And I hope it's a homage to the great spirit of Shakespeare who's still so
strongly with us all. So a big shout out to Shakespeare as well.
Thanks everyone for watching. Thank you Hildegard. Thank you, Mike.