Antony and Cleopatra
National Theatre Live/At Home

THIS revelatory production on YouTube, starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, certainly has contemporary resonance.  

Director Simon Godwin’s decision to stage the production in modern dress points that up — the startling insights of Shakespeare's play about events in the ancient world seem as applicable today as they could ever be.

Antony and Cleopatra is not just a love story nor bound by historical events. In Godwin's hands, it's a penetrating exposé of life as lived by the powerful and famous in any and every age.

The self-obsession and delusional indulgence of those who inhabit  celebrity culture — sporting heroes, beauty icons, heads of state, politicians — all swim into focus, as do the terrors that possess them and their forever-unfulfilled longings, even as they bestride the narrow world surrounded by fawning slaves.  

Getting what they want is so routine that, when flouted, they are shocked to the core.

Cleopatra (Okonedo) eventually takes her own life, not as an act of grim desperation but as a last-ditch attempt to defy the vagaries of fate and exert her own power.

Antony (Fiennes), so steeped in his own dominance, is nevertheless forced to face his own fragility and ultimate death. “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” he declares, as if taking on board his own fundamental mortality for the first time.

The two leads, immaculate in delivery, capture an inflated sense of greatness perfectly, while Tim McMullan as Enobarbus, adoring friend to hero Antony and mesmerised admirer of the glorious Cleopatra, comes to his senses when he finally abandons Antony.

As an ordinary citizen, he rejects the palaver and mayhem of these demi-gods with feet of clay — a lesson for our times, surely.

Until May 14 on YouTube: youtube.com/user/ntdiscovertheatre