Reconfiguring Transgressive Stage Space: Multiculturalism in Antony and Cleopatra (Directed by Barry Avrich, Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 2015)

Abstract

This essay applies geocritical and adaptation theories to the 2015 production of
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, represented at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, available on
Digital Theatre Plus. The production directed for film by Barry Avrich (and for the theatre by Gary Griffin)
represented a multicultural and multiracial Roman Empire, in which characters evolved almost chaotically.
Yet this relative chaos was partially ordered by the figure of authority (Octavius Caesar), while Antony’s transgressive character and Cleopatra’s histrionic personality were the perplexing agents that provided excitement. Starting from the concept of “transgressivity” (Westphal 37), I argue that this production (as well as Shakespeare’s play) represented the expansive space of the Roman Empire (with the inland Mediterranean Sea) as disordered and troublesome settings, tragically marked by the characters’ psychological flaws and their inadequacies. Rather than showing an ordered universe marked by the overwhelming Roman military authority, the production repositioned multiculturalism in an ambivalent space of encounter and civil war, which challenged authoritarian figures representing stern concepts of Romanitas. Antony and Cleopatra