Here’s an unofficial yardstick for assessing stage tragedies: the Giggle Index. It is astonishingly hard to maintain dramatic intensity in a room full of strangers, because a common reaction to long stretches of unironically expressed emotion is the strong desire to giggle.
This Antony and Cleopatra provoked two noticeable spikes on the snicker scale: first, when Sophie Okonedo’s Cleopatra unveils her absolutely foolproof plan to get her servants to tell Antony that she’s dead when she isn’t. (Have you not seen Romeo and Juliet, woman?) Second, when Ralph Fiennes’s Antony spends a full minute stabbing himself to no avail. “Not dead?” he laments, giving his bloodied dagger a you-had-one-job look. “Not dead?”
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