The Cleopatras

BBC historical costume dramas stumbled in the 1980s. The '70s triumphs of Fall of Eagles, I Claudius, and The Devil's Crown were followed by the legendarily bad The Borgias (1981) and then this series in 1983. Telling the story of the decline and fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, it blatantly wants to be another I Claudius so very badly. And in this it succeeds... in doing it very badly.

At only eight episodes (as opposed to the more usual 13) I wonder if the series had a much more limited budget than its predecessors - the minimalist sets and bare studio floors could be a stylistic choice, I suppose, but I suspect one that comes from the production trying to make a virtue out of necessity.

Written by Philip Mackie, who had previously been responsible for the excellent The Caesars (1968), you could be forgiven for expecting better. The basic plot structure is quite good and there was obviously lot of potential there for another scandalous story full of intrigue and incest (the end of part four is the first time in the series when we see a pharaoh on the throne whose parents aren't closely related), but the script is full of clumsy, exposition-laden dialogue and flat, characterless characters.

We don't spend enough time with any of the main characters (except perhaps the last Cleopatra, i.e. the famous one) to see any of their hidden depths or what makes them behave the way they do. Even the last Cleopatra, who appears in the framing device for parts one to five and then the main plot for the final episodes, has nothing like the depth of motivation compared with, say, Livia or Agrippina in I Claudius. 

Once you get past the first episode or two and get used to the idiosyncratic style you can enjoy the series to a point, but only in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. The riveting drama of I Claudius it is not, because here it is all surface.

Part of the issue lies in the names. In I Claudius, Caligula was almost always called Caligula even though it was his nickname "Little Boots" because there were at least two other characters called Gaius who appeared in the series before him, and there were several other major characters in a similar situation. I Claudius went out of its way to make these relationships easy on the audience, whereas this series seems determined to make it needlessly complicated to follow who is who and how they are all related - here we have multiple Cleopatras (hence the series title), across several generations, but they're all referred to as "Cleopatra." 

For example, in episode three there are no fewer than six characters called Cleopatra, credited respectively as:

1. Cleopatra, the queen
2. Cleopatra, the young girl
3. Cleopatra, the eldest daughter
4. Cleopatra Tryphaena
5. Cleopatra Selene
6. Cleopatra Berenike

This is far from The Cleopatras' biggest problem though. For that we must turn from the writer to the director, John Frankau. The pacing and editing of the series are all over the place and distinctly uneven, with every scene change using electronic transitions like you might have seen in that era's Top of the Pops. This is a gimmick that massively outstays its welcome because it is so obtrusive - it seemed to me that some scenes were split up just so that there could be extra transitions to another event and then back to the first.

The other thing the director liked spending time on instead of, say, directing the actors, was the topless or near-naked dancers, who appear in any and every scene they can possibly be shoehorned into. You could argue it makes the point that Egypt is a debauched and decadent civilisation when every other scene is a drunken feast where dignitaries are entertained by such, but not when it is so frequently on screen as to take time away from all other aspects of the drama.

The directorial problems don't stop there. Normally reliable character actors such as Richard Griffiths, Stephen "Travis" Greif, and Ian "Harcourt" McNeice delivered their lines as though either badly under-rehearsed or else just trying to get through them as quickly as possible so they can get away from this dreadful series.

In episodes five through seven we see Robert Hardy playing Julius Caesar. He, at least, looks like he's having fun as the civilised Roman who has had enough of the degenerate Egyptians and all of their bullshit. As a veteran of BBC historical costume dramas, not least Elizabeth R, he is the only actor in the series truly able to rise above the quality of the material he's being served.

For a brief moment we get maybe a glimmer of what the series could have been like, but after the assassination of Caesar, there isn't much to look forward to in the final episode unless you enjoy seeing Mark Antony's bare arse (as played by Christopher Neame's bare arse). Purr... er, I mean... Mew; Shakespeare's Antony and the Cleopatras this is not.

In conclusion: cats were supposed to have been worshiped in Ancient Egypt, but there is no sign of that here!

Avoid this series like the plague(s of Egypt), mew.