It’s Friday, so welcome to the second film in our six-week Friday Film Focus on Antony and Cleopatra. Each week, I’ll present a capsule review of an A&C video, with full reviews coming in a future podcast.
In 1980, as Jonathan Miller was beginning his tenure as the producer of the BBC Complete Works of Shakespeare in the series third season, he filmed Antony and Cleopatra, starring Colin Blakely as Antony and Jane Lapotaire as Cleopatra.
As with the vast majority of the series, a great emphasis was put on a kind of faux-Elizabethan presentation. Thus, the costuming is a weird mixture of classic and Renaissance. And as is per usual with this series, the production is done on a soundstage, and thus the plays can be pretty stagey.
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