Antony and Cleopatra at Maynardville

One of Shakespeare's better known tragedies, opens the 55th Shakespeare season at Maynardville Open-Air Theatre

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a play of epic proportions. Spanning a ten year period of high drama and politics and covering most of the Mediterranean world, Antony and Cleopatra is considered asShakespeare’s most luxuriant tragedy.

For centuries the tale of the last Queen of Egypt and her adulterous affair with the Roman hero Mark Antony has captured the imagination and has given rise to a multitude of plays, films and books, but seldom with as much bristling sexuality and insight into the workings of love and politics between male and female, desire and duty, the bed and the battlefield, emotion and reason and between age and youth as in this complex work by Shakespeare.

Cleopatra is without a doubt Shakespeare’s most complex female character. Apart from being a mother, wife, lover and ruler of a country with an extraordinary and refined culture and a history spanning three millennia, she - unlike Mark Antony - was an astute commentator on life. Intensely aware of herself as a player on the global stage, her sheer unpredictability of behaviour gives the play the syncopated rhythm of a thriller.

Antony and Cleopatra may be world leaders, but they were also only human - flawed and ageing ones at that. As human beings they share their mortality, jealousy, love, shame, and insecurity. Despite their historical grandeur and thanks to Shakespeare's sensitive portrayal of them, Antony and Cleopatra are no more—and no less—extraordinary than we are.

Special times & prices:

12 – 15 Jan: Preview nights - 2 tickets for price of 1
16 Jan: Gala opening night
18 – 19 Jan: Family night @ 19:45 – 22:30
25 - 26 Jan: Family & School night @ 19:45 – 22:30
1 – 3 Feb & 8 – 10 Feb: School nights ONLY @ 19:45 – 22h30

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