The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra

Maybe 3.5 stars, but Shakesman can take it - we can chip away at his stars!! 500 years later!! WHO CARES, AMIRITE?!Anyway, so this was my second SPQR hangover read/listen (the first being Oedipus Rex), and - despite it making me want to puke - I preferred Oedipus. I mean, this ALSO made me want to puke, but more from annoyance/cringe. This was like “Yoko Ono breaking up the Beatles”, mixed with heavy doses of groan-inducing Orientalism and dick jokes (so many dick jokes. : ) and weird tonal shifts that led me to - as Antony (played by Kenneth Branagh) semi-kills himself and then chokes out, “Not dead. Not dead!” - laaaaugh.So Wiki says this is sometimes considered a “problem play”. Reviews have historically been mixed. I can see why it's not often staged. I actually saw this years ago in London. I remember laughing when Antony was dying then as well. I put it down to the directorial choices in that specific production. But maybe this is what Shakespeare originally intended? Because there's a sort of... horrible, pitying, pitch-black slapstick quality to all of this, to the teenage-level raging hormones of Antony and Cleopatra, to the shrill vanity of Cleopatra and the lurching drunkenness of Antony, while nearly all other characters roll their eyes. It's just like: they're not sympathetic at all, until they VERY briefly are, and then you just feel awful for them (tragedie!). Things that start in media res are great, and this play starts very nicely AFTER much insanity has already occurred: Pompey the Great is dead (and his son, Pompey Jr., is fighting the Second Triumvirate), Julius Caesar is dead (and his adopted son, Octavius Caesar - who would become Augustus - is leading armies around), Brutus is dead (duh), Marc Antony has gone to seed, and there is a general feeling of “has-been-ness” and the younger generation (Pompey Jr and Octavius/Augustus, especially) starting to edge the older ones (Marc Antony, everyone else) out. It was a tectonic shift in Rome's history; politically surviving such an earthquake would have been miraculous.The Orientalist qualities of this play are also - goddamn just wow. This is pure Orientalism, in what Edward Said originally described: the stereotype of a effete, feminizing, debauched, besotted East. Nearly every scene in Egypt features Antony very clearly ensnared in booze and Cleopatra, while all the other Romans shake their heads. Both Antony and Cleopatra are also hot blooded stereotypes of rits of fealous jage, to the point that you (or I, at least) start to lose patience with them. ROME COULD BE YOURS, ANTONY, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.And that, I guess, was the point?P.S. Alex Kingston plays Cleopatra in the BBC version, and if you wanna talk romance and epickal tragedie, then this scene from Doctor Who is just my goddamn faaaaave. “Spoilers.” Yeah, you're welcome for the cathartic cry.