Sex & The City star Kim Cattrall comes to Chichester
Kim Cattrall talks to Al Senter about playing Cleopatra at Chichester Festival Theatre
For two thousand years she’s been known as the most powerful, intelligent and seductive woman of all time, a woman who captivated everybody who came within her orbit. Cleopatra has continued to work her magic through the centuries and though it must be a daunting task to bring her to life, every actress worth her salt longs to play her one day. Now it’s Kim Cattrall’s turn to step up to the plate for a second time to give her Serpent Of The Nile. As the woman who created Samantha Jones, the voluptuous man-eater, and played her through several series and two feature films of Sex And The City, the part could scarcely be in better hands.
Kim has enjoyed a long and distinguished career on stage, in film and TV and theatre in Toronto, New York and in London’s West End where most recently she appeared as Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. It’s two years since Kim first played the Egyptian queen in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in her native Liverpool. Then, as now, the production was in the hands of director Janet Suzman, herself a notable Cleopatra in the 1970s. Kim is relishing the opportunity of revisiting the part and exploring the character in all her many facets.
“Peter Hall once said to me, when I told him I was about to make my first trip down the Nile, that it’s Cleopatra’s changeability that is the key. It is that changeability that makes playing her such a challenge,” says Kim. “She’ll suddenly switch moods in the middle of a line, sometimes even in the middle of a word. She is a Queen, highly intelligent with an extraordinary quickness of cunning and wit. It’s fascinating to think how powerful she was, especially for her time. She had long relationships and children with two of the most powerful men in the known world: first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony.
“Shakespeare really does so much of the work for you. If you know where to look for it. What strikes me is how every character in it is given a full internal life by Shakespeare. Even Mardian, the eunach, is given dreams of fulfilment. A longing for ‘more than life’ in two lines.”
Central to the play is the contrast between austere, puritan, censorious Rome and Egypt where, according to his critics, Antony has been corrupted, sinking into a life of idleness and sheer indulgence. This tension can be seen in Antony’s character between his political interests in Rome and his heart’s desire in Egypt. Cleopatra must wait on her lover’s decision. Could the emotional insecurity caused by their situation be one of the keys to the character?
“She’s with a married man – how much more insecurity do you need?” Kim responds. “She doesn’t know what’s happening when Antony is out of sight. Where is he? Who is he with? Fulvia, his first wife, or Octavia, his second? I’m really enjoying playing those scenes with Michael [Pennington]. He has such strength but also a vulnerability with her. He’s weak at the knees for her ‘in Egypt my pleasure lies.’”
Antony & Cleopatra, Festival Theatre, Chichester
Until Saturday 29 September
Box office 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
