SOURCE: Fleming, Juliet. Review of Antony and Cleopatra. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5170 (3 May 2002): 19.

In the following review of Michael Attenborough's 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Antony and Cleopatra, Fleming finds fault with the production's slow start and muddled enunciation of verse, but contends that the strong female performances, particularly Sinead Cusack's fine Cleopatra, saved the production.

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra feels a moment of panic as the curtain first rises and they remember the play's potential length, its episodic structure, its closely packed style, and the fact that its premiss is an orientalist fantasy that pits a luxurious, feminized East against an austere and triumphant Rome. (It is an odd fact that theatre companies now carefully anxious in their staging of Othello are still prepared to represent Shakespeare's Egypt as little more than a beauty parlour. Shakespeare's own description of Egypt is drawn from Plutarch...