Vanessa’s matchless talent and controversial politics (diehard Marxist, pro-PLO) have made her at 59 the most visible (and audible) actress of her generation. In her recently published “Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography,” she speaks of herself with quiet pride as “an English radical,” a descendant of her socialist grandfather Eric and her socialist father, Michael Redgrave, who was black-listed by the BBC in 1941 until Churchill got the greatly popular actor unbanned. So it’s no surprise that she and her like-minded brother see “Antony” and “Caesar” as plays dealing with questions of power that resonate from ancient Romero Elizabethan England to our own time. “There’s great nostalgia for Brezhnev’s or Stalin’s period in Russia now,” says Corin. “That thirst for absolute power was terrifically alive in Shakespeare’s day and it’s terrifically alive today in three quarters of our world.”
The Redgraves do the two plays as a kind of Shakespearean mini-series. And they do them not in togas and tunics but in Elizabethan dress, emphasizing Shakespeare’s chutzpah as he drew parallels between Elizabeth I and his Caesars and Cleos. Corin (who was marvelous as the monstrously snobbish Sir Walter Elliot in the recent film of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”) plays Caesar as a tough s.o.b. who battles his assassins with the fury of Bruce Lee and looks as though he may even beat them off. Vanessa plays Cleopatra with an epic volatility: she greets the news of the death of Antony’s wife, Fulvia, with hysterical hilarity, pulls a faint as Antony leaves her for Rome, whips off a shoe to slug a had-news messenger. After Antony’S death, Redgrave flames into tragic incandescence: Cleopatra’s ambitions and seductions are stilled by her “immortal longings” as she embraces the fatal serpent in the most transcendently erotic death scene in drama.
The plays are joint productions, with the multicultural east divided between the two companies. Inevitably the fusion is imperfect in style and rhythm. Not that all the English outshine the Americans: the Alley’s Alex Allen Morris catches the shrewd cynicism of Antony’s aide Enobarbus. The Moving Theatre’s David Harewood, the hardest worker onstage, is Antony in both plays. His speech at Caesar’s funeral in “Julius Caesar” should be seen by all our presidential candidates as a potent specimen of pushing the buttons of a skeptical crowd. In “Antony and Cleopatra” Hare-wood, as a graying but still sexy Antony, captures the pain of a defeated man of action. You hear no Hamletish, Macbethan soliloquies from this top gun who’s always gone straight to the point in war and love.
Notorious: The swift, almost cinematic play, with its notoriously difficult lead roles, is not often produced. “Antony has to ascend these terrifying heights and then fall to these abysmal depths, not once but three times,” says Corin. As-for Cleopatra, “you’re told you’re the most fascinating woman in the world,” says Vanessa, “and you think, ‘Well, I’m not and I don’t know how to pretend to be.’ I try to put myself inside a woman with an insatiable hunger to consume everything, even the man she feels she loves. Only at the end does she see him and everyone else as the real people they are. Only then does she become really human.”
Becoming really human is a reasonable way of summing up Vanessa’s ideology. In her book she quotes a socialist colleague who blames Lenin for the corruption of the Soviet system. Vanessa comments: “You could just as well say that Jesus Christ was responsible for the Spanish Inquisition.” There’s a kind of surreal innocence in that logic, a quality that shows up often in this absorbing memoir; for example, her meeting with Marx–Groucho, that is–who promises to make a donation for a Marxist school she is planning, but never coughs up. But only a fool would condescend to Vanessa Redgrave. As UNICEF envoy to the former Yugoslavia, she has worked with children (and Jewish organizations): Her energy as artist and activist is unique and astonishing. Her daughters, Natasha and Joely Richardson, are carrying on the greatest of theatrical dynasties. She should of course by now be Dame Vanessa Redgrave. “I have no wish to be Damed,” she says. Her (slightly wistful?) smile says: no chance with my politics. Question the politics, but accept her humanity and her genius. What a dame.
