R.P.

This is something that came up already with the Dream a few years ago - when you were thinking about the set, were Elizabethan theatres in your mind?

S.J.

Very much. We knew that you could perform any Shakespearian play without sets. It just started from that premiss - we didn't need anything. Everybody had got into a terrible sort of deadend, over-pictorialising everything, especially that particular play, which needed at that time a complete new broom. And that really is what led us to where we went.

R.P.

But this set is very unlike the Dream.

S.J.

Very unlike, but one actually started again with that over-made element of pictorialisation which is associated with Cleopatra. One was stuck with that in one's head. Somehow we had to get rid of that in order to release the play. So that, in that respect, I was trying to reinvent the play, for our production. But the solution is entirely different, because the play is entirely different - but again one was dealing with another form of degraded parrot.

R.P.

It wasn't Mendelssohn you had to fight this time.

S.J.

No. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton; Cecil B.de Mille and Claudette Colbert and the Victorians - and just sheer spectacle. The barge - and the treasures of Tutankhamen.......... That was absolutely the only similarity, that one had to deal with that. And the way I did it was - I just went completely in the other direction.

R.P.

The last production here did use that style of costume, quite a bit of Tutankhamen. [Trevor Nunn's production in 1972.]

S.J

Academically very accurate.

R.P.

Which, after all, has nothing to do with Jacobean plays.

S.J.

No, nothing at all.

R.P.

Was it this theatre you had in mind from the beginning in planning this production? Was there no thought of its ever being done elsewhere?

S.J.

No.

R.P.

I wondered about that, because I thought that one of the most helpful things the set did was to reduce the size of the stage and to divide the areas of the stage in a most interesting way.

S.J.

That again was a necessity: to create the right sort of intimate space for the play to happen against a background, an ambiguous background. A place where one could always be aware of the outside world affecting the domestic space - and to relate these. Which is why it's a half-seen world, semi-transparent, with many ways of coming and going in and out of it, anchored by the carpet area, which gives a focus to the main action.

R.P.

All of that worked beautifully. There was a wonderful continuity too - the scenes coming in behind as others left the stage.

S.J.

Well, that was Peter's commitment very early on. No obligation whatsoever to set the difference between Alexandria and Rome. That it should be a place in which everything can flow through, and the people come and bring their world with them, and that there was no commitment to showing location. This didn't seem necessary as you read the play. You didn't have to know.

R.P.

At what point in the proceedings did you feel that the irrevocable decisions about the set had been made? Was there much change during the rehearsal period, or was it all pretty clear before then?

S.J.

It was very clear right from the beginning. There were two opposite ways of using the space - which was not clear. Peter went on shifting one way and then the other for quite a while on that. That is, there was a way of arranging the enclosure which was more domestic, and then a way of arranging the enclosure which was more archetypal, noble, architectural: so that the one gave us the grandeur, and the other gave us the domesticity. Until he got well into rehearsal, he wasn't sure which way. Just by rearranging the parts that you saw there on the stage, one had still those two alternatives to play with, which he did go on being slightly ambivalent about until he'd got well into rehearsal, until he'd really worked the material through. Then he found, of course, that the domesticity is created by the carpet, and that it was perfectly all right to have it in the noble structure - and that if you domesticated the structure you could only play on one level. So, we got the best of both worlds, in a way, in the end - the way I hoped. But he felt overpowered by the set originally.

R.P.

Was there ever any question of a raised level for the monument?

S.J.

No, never.

R.P.

I thought that it was the most wonderfully simple expedient for that scen [IV, xv]. It works beautifully, the pulling up of Antony.

S.J.

He just knew, right from the beginning, that he would find a way of doing that which had nothing to do with levels ........ We knew right from the beginning that we wanted a permanent setting, which could be used for everything, with variations just at the point where you'd saturated that use. You then overlay and bring in - like in music, you know - work the variations until you need a new theme. So we did that all the way through. But there was no place within that for structural set changes - and since there wasn't, he knew that he would find a way of pulling Antony up without there being another level.

R.P.

Might I ask you to say a word or two about the costumes? Was there a very clear sense of the succession of Glenda Jackson's costumes as reflecting the different scenes in the play? She has what looks to be an enormous range and variety of costumes - maybe fewer than they seemed?

S.J.

Actually, she had a lot more costumes than you saw. What I did was, I designed a wardrobe for her, and we found that if she wore everything for every purpose, she just had too many clothes. Some things seemed to pin her down and clarify the look better than others, so I began, at that point in dress rehearsal when you see everything for the first time, to eliminate certain things and to simplify. What we've come down to is just those changes which seem absolutely necessary for the playing of the play. I've eliminated quite a lot of other changes which seemed right psychologically - originally. But one always loses those things, because the actress or the actor, they do it without the need of costume eventually. Often it happens that you over-visualise the thing until the actors take it over and make it their own, and then they need very little, very little. It just has to be the right thing. So that with her clothes particularly it was almost impossible for me to pin down the right look until she'd got to the stage where she was herself - and I did that all through the dress rehearsal and preview period.

R.P.

I didn't see the French production of Timon in Paris, but I wondered whether the costuming owed anything to what Peter Brook has been doing in Paris?

S.J.

I think it owes a lot to what's happened since we did the Dream. Because what has happened is that so much good work now is done without costume or set. The line that the designer has to tread now is really minimal. So you can no longer go back to a production like this which, because it's on the stage in a conventional theatre, means that you have an obligation to set it and to costume it in the way that you can't do if you're setting up the carpet in the town hall, or out in the park somewhere. You actually have to dominate the space that you're in, which is a conventional stage. You've got to work against it and pull people into the world of the play. But you can't ignore what's happened in our vocabulary and our experience over the last ten or fifteen years, with all the superb work that's done in small groups with nothing. There are a lot of things which just seem terribly old-fashioned, seem over-designed now, which ten years ago would have been a treat. And that was very hard for me, to find that line between, where I know that if I just put an important big robe on an actor he becomes an important figure. But how far to go in the detailing of that towards historical truth, evocative romantic feeling, and all these things? I find now it's become very difficult to hit the right line. I struggled with these costumes, and I think I finally got it, with a minimum of what's necessary ........ You never any more, I don't think, go into this highly pictorial, idiosyncratic, designer's world. It's meaningless now, it looks rococo.

R.P.

What I got very strongly last night was an overall feeling from the costumes of a fairly timeless Mediterranean world - both the Roman and the Egyptian.

S.J.

Oh, I'm so glad you said that! That's really what I based it on, more than anything.

R.P.

They could have belonged to a distant period. They could be almost contemporary. In different scenes the different suggestions were there.

S.J.

I'm very glad you got that.

R.P.

I thought that was very strong - that scene [III, xi] when Cleopatra and her women come in after the first defeat, with suddenly their Arab head-dresses, and her prostration in front of Antony. The flexibility of some of the tunics and robes, the different ways they wore them, I found most powerful.

S.J.

There was a long period where I thought I would just have to use togas for the Romans and battled with myself to get rid of the toga. In the end I went to the Middle-Eastern big robe, with the stripes on it, which actually is a much more fresh way of looking at the world, but still had the stateliness of senators, important men in a hot climate - a cool, westernised world compared with the Egyptian.

R.P.

I thought the Roman costumes wonderfully combined the different suggestions, and yet, as you say, got away from togas, which have nothing to do with Shakespeare anyway.

S.J.

No. Also difficult to act in and restricting.

R.P.

It fitted the performances beautifully to have the ease of movement.

R.P.

[Of the production in general] ......the play's revived by it, totally.

S.J.

He [Brook] has that wonderful way of going fearlessly straight into that area where it is exposed - totally. And I go along with that, with him. That's what he always does. The play always emerges, I think, in the most extraordinary way.

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Playing Shakespeare/Antony and Cleopatra