Conquering Cleo

Ahead of the première of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford, Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that he had “never seen this play fulfilled on stage or witnessed two actors adequate to its leading roles.”

I know what he means. The last time I risked it was a couple of decades ago ‒ a dreary production with a schoolmarmish Cleo at the Birmingham Rep.

Well, the new production at the Swan, a joint effort of two American companies (the Public in New York and GableStage in Miami) together with the RSC, scores a creditable one out of two.

The Mark Antony, the well-established British actor Jonathan Cake, really looks as though he has wandered in from a remake of Carry On Cleo.

But the Cleopatra, Joaquina Kalukango, virtually fresh from the Juilliard School in New York, is absolutely magnificent. What a pity she didn’t bring her own leading man.

Divas and urban myths

It’s over twenty years since I started researching and writing about the life and work of the great Australian diva, Dame Nellie Melba. Throughout that time, when I asked professional singers and other musicians about her, they would smile knowingly, and there would be a pause…

“Don’t you know that she was into oral sex?… In the intervals of operas… in her dressing room… said it was good for her vocal cords.”

I must have heard it dozens of times. And yet, of course, there seems to be no real evidence, beyond the fact that it’s an urban myth.

So I was quite surprised to read in Rupert Christiansen’s column in the Daily Telegraph recently that she would “haul stage hands into her dressing room…” Someone had told him that it was true – and Christiansen’s story at least has the embellishment of the stage hands.

How can one possibly know the truth at this distance in time? And only recently I was told that the original story was not about Melba at all, but about her great competitor, the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini.

Of course, there’s no actual evidence for that either, unless, of course, someone in the know told you…