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In justice to the 19-member cast, none flags in his or her efforts. As artistic director of the festival, Robin Phillips deserves unstinting credit for offering Stratford audiences the full bounty of a playwright of Congreve's stature. In The Way of the World, Congreve walks as close as he ever could in Moliere's footsteps. He casts a pitiless light on the vices of a leisure class that is trapped too high on the social scale for aspiration. Following an endless round of pleasure, these people are self-indulgent, inconstant, frustrated and foiled. In their cynical worldliness they dare not believe in friendship or hope for love. They are as tarnished within as they are polished without. They talk as one might expect people to talk in heaven, but they live like people who have fashioned their own hell.
Antony and Cleopatra is a devilishly difficult play to put on convincingly. To begin with, the imagery applied to the two lovers has an Olympian grandeur that somewhat dwarfs merely mortal actors. Antony is "the triple pillar of the world" and an erstwhile demigod in battle. When he dies, Cleopatra says "the odds is gone"—meaning that the world has lost its prime measure of greatness.
As for Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety ... other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies." Even the vows that she and Antony swear in lovers' defiance of the world are thunderously imperial. Says Antony: "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!" and Cleopatra echoes, "Melt Egypt into Nile!"
Granted the almost insuperable problems of portraying such exalted beings, Maggie Smith's Cleopatra and Keith Baxter's Antony are blazingly well executed. Smith is not precisely a sultry, sun-kissed figure of voluptuousness, but she is regal, cunning, mercurial, and desperately in love with her "man of men." One feels about Keith Baxter's Antony that he has outgrown the self-sacrifices characteristic of the Roman code. The grizzled veteran now prefers to make love, not war.
One of the most compelling achievements of the Smith-Baxter performances is to show how separation from each other is the divorce that Antony and Cleopatra cannot bear. Their love has grafted each in the other's heart and mind so that when they are forced apart, it is a semi-suicide. She wonders, in rapt preoccupation, whether he is sitting, or standing, or riding his horse. When he orders his fleet to turn and follow her deserting ships in the sea battle that destroys his fortunes against Octavius Caesar, it is not that he has totally lost valor, but that being anywhere but with her is the severest loss he can contemplate. When her eyes water in remorse, he chides her with his undaunted love: "Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates all that is won and lost ..."
The polar conflict of the play is be tween love and empire or desire and duty, with Egypt symbolizing one and Rome the other. Director Phillips sets up a telling counterpoint between the brisk, businesslike military scenes and the perfumed enchantment of the amorous interludes.