19:00, Tue 22nd – Sat 26th November 2016 at Pembroke New Cellars
Michaelmas Week 7

1980s Alexandria, the television flickers on: ‘‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s overflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, that over the flies and musters of war have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn […] his captain’s heart […] is become the bellows and the fan to cool a gypsy’s lust”

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a love story born from political conflict: ambition, backstabbing and corruption. Witness the collision of two worlds: Rome, a modern, global superpower, and Cleopatra’s Egypt, a psychedelic landscape, a bower of bliss beyond the confines of Rome. Sparks fly. The drums of war begin to sound.

Fame and power converge on tabloid pages and television screens, changing romance to scandal. Personal identities are shaken along with public images. Both worlds begin to crumble, as egos are pitted against emotions.

This Michaelmas, see the ‘gaudy night’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy transposed onto the cultural landscape of the 1980s: radical politics, the ‘cult of personality’, music and excess.

“Strung out in heaven's high
Hitting an all-time low…”