Performed by Toneelgroep Amsterdam in Dutch, and directed by the brilliant Ivo van Hove, this was an amazing show. Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were combined in brilliantly edited versions in what became a six-hour show with no intervals. It seems rather austere to watch six hours of Shakespeare in a language you don't understand but it was thrilling and incredibly accessible.
Every single actor was remarkable but the most astonishing performance was that of Hans Kesting who played Mark Antony. He's a huge bear of a man, but captures incredible tenderness; it was the tension between that tenderness and his visceral force that really haunted me.
Kesting played Antony in a wheelchair with his leg in a cast. At the time I thought this was a brilliant bit of direction because Antony is the heroic, damaged soldier, but it turned out that Kesting had broken his leg the week before! But it was an extraordinary way of articulating Anthony's state of paralysis in his relationships with Cleopatra and with the murderers of Caesar.
The audience was free to move around the auditorium, and I was sitting on a sofa on the stage about four feet away from where Kesting delivered the burial speech. His combination of raging fury and deep, proper love for Caesar, captured in this damaged body, made the hairs on my arms stand up. And the desire, eroticism and damaged love for the final hour when he was playing Antony with Cleopatra was mind-blowing.
It was epic but desperately intimate at the same time. I've never seen anyone direct Shakespeare with that level of imagination. The show as a whole was one of the best theatre experiences I've ever had, with Hans Kesting's Antony a startling climax to an exceptional evening.
Playwright Simon Stephens's new play, Wastwater, is at the Royal Court until 7 May. His new translation for I Am the Wind opens at the Young Vic on 26 April
