The Portrait Of A Lady

Vivien Leigh & The Stage

Leigh and Olivier play Shaw and Shakespeare

Judging by the advance ticket sale - almost $ 1 million - what theater audiences most want to see this season is the love life of Cleopatra acted by Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier. The Leigh-Olivier tandem, which was a London hit last summer and will open on Broadway next week, consists of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra give at alternate performances. Together they comprise a girlhood-to-death epic of Egypt's ruler with Leigh as Cleopatra and Olivier doubling as the two Romans who made her, successively, a queen and a woman.

Both plays unfold against many of the same settings, which gives the story an unexpected unity. Moreover the plays, different as they are, fit curiously well together, as if Shaw had written a kind of prologue to Shakespeare (G.B.S. would have snorted that Shakespeare's play was a mere epilogue to his).

Playgoers are bound to deabte the respective merits of both actors in both plays. Many will feel that Leigh is best as Shaw's child queen and Olivier as Shakespeare's passion-ridden soldier. Whatever the verdict, the combination of Shakespeare and Shaw and the team of Leigh and Olivier provide the most brilliant display of mixed doubles in Broadway history.

Caesar Grooms A Queen

In Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra Caesar is a mouthpiece for Shaw himself. Playing the part in pale make-up and gray wig, Sir Laurence Olivier teaches Cleopatra the art of being a queen, stressing Caesar's benevolence and adding a dash of Mr. Chips to the famous Roman of them all. In the scene above he helps deck the child queen in her robe of state. Terrified at the prospect of meeting Caesar - she does not suspect that her elderly friend is Caesar himself - she wonders if he will recognize her as a queen. Caesar bucks her up by saying, "He will know Cleopatra by her pride, her courage, her majesty and her beauty".

Queen Cleopatra and her Antony

Casting her passionate spell over Antony, Cleopatra makes the great Roman general so far forget his military duties that eventually he is vanquished by his enemies. One of Antony's friends, on seeing the couple, speaks,

                       ...His captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust.

2003 � Vivien Leigh & The Stage.

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