Antony and Cleopatra

Shakespeare's play directed with hopeless stodginess, contriving to damp down all the fires (romantic, poetic, histrionic) to a sort of shabby naturalism, and very nearly irretrievably sunk by Hildegard Neil's petulant Cleopatra, a suburban schoolmarm having a fling on the Nile. On the credit side, the verse is very capably and clearly spoken; Heston gives an intelligently sotto voce reading of Antony as an old lion moth-eaten at the edges but still with a few roars left in him; and there are excellent performances from Porter (Enobarbus) and Castle (Octavius).