Hatchet Job of the Day

In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, it is said of the eponymous Queen that her person “beggar’d all description.” When it comes to Kathryn Hunter’s interpretation of Cleopatra in the RSC’s latest product, the critics have not been quite so lost for words.

Richard Edmonds in The Stage opined that:

At points, [Hunter] resembled little more than the matchmaker from The Fiddler on the Roof.

Few critics however been as biting as Neil Norman in The Sunday Express:

Affecting an Egyptian accent she frequently sounds like Eartha Kitt speaking through a veil and her words are often indecipherable.

His companion-at-arms, The Express‘s Mark Shenton is even more venomous:

Hunter is hardly obvious casting for someone about whom it is famously said that “age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”. In fact, wearing a succession of dresses that reveal bare shoulders, arms and back, she has already withered, and her grating voice offers no variety.

Ouch. Not a review one would want to clasp to one’s bosom.