In AD 130, an adolescent man falls into the Nile and drowns. His lover, the fifty-four-year-old Emperor Hadrian, is devastated: his grief is so thorough he warps his young lover into a god. Such was the prevalence of the new cult that to this day Antinous is one of the most commonly sculpted faces in the world. You will not find an antiquities collection that does not boast a likeness.
It is the death of this man that forms the centerpiece of People You Know Productions’ latest play, Antinous. Dramatizing the reaction of Hadrian and his companions after his lover’s untimely demise, the play is a slick and beautiful portrait of grief, but its runtime of forty-five minutes remits the depth of themes and character that I would have liked to see. Yet the minutes it does have it uses very well to create a visually stirring and emotionally arresting piece of theatre.
Will Hastie is the clear star as Hadrian. He wallows, sallow-faced and doe-eyed on the mattress that serves as the stage’s centrepiece for the whole of the show. This is a play about grief, and Hastie makes sure we know it: he demands Antinous over and over again, trying to replicate him a thousand different ways until he settles on definition. The oversized sleeves on his costume make him a new Agamemnon, trapped in a robe woven not by his wife but the prison of his own mind.
His foil is his long-suffering wife, Sabina, portrayed bedecked in bangles and eyeshadow by Vida White. She gives an exceptionally beautiful speech likening herself to Penelope fending off the suitors as she awaits her husband—though unlike Penelope, Sabina is doomed to wait forever. The play grapples with a woman faced with a husband who makes no secret of his preference for others, and though its length makes this challenging to explore, she does voice the tension that hangs over the entirety of the play: that beautiful, idolized Antinous perhaps did not love Hadrian after all.
Unfortunately, the play drops this plot thread as soon as it’s mentioned. This is a shame, because Antinous himself looms like an axe over the characters—and yet the blade never drops. The story of the historical Antinous’s life is not necessarily a happy one—how are we to know what the teenage boy thought of being whisked away from his home to serve the emperor? And who can imagine saying no to the emperor, ruler of half the world? This is a question the play is begging to be answered, and yet it remains deep and unprobed.
Instead we get Ajax, another slave of Hadrian. His role is a stand-in for Antinous, whether for Hadrian to attempt another lover, the audience to understand the yoke of slavery, or Ajax himself clawing upwards to become the emperor’s favourite—or having that favouritism thrust upon him. Ajax’s actor, Jonathan Stock, also wrote the play—one presumes the production team thought he was the only one who could understand the facets of the character.
The costume team have bedecked Stock with necklace and scalloped-neck shirts, and when he finally morphs into the image of Antinous come play’s end, he seems to have become the beautiful, ill-fated boy. Yet the highlight of his performance is a moving speech about having his family separated as they were sold into slavery, elevated by the haunting cello accompaniment. It is another plot strand that I wish was explored more—a way to peel back the silks and clear the grapes to reveal the undercurrent of these characters.
The other three actors are the chorus—a spiteful group of white-faced, red-lipped actors that lounge onstage to glare at actors and audience alike. At times they are real people, at others a figment of Hadrien’s mind: the boundary is purposefully blurred. They are gauche and cliched but ultimately passable: even if there is little original about their usage, they do allow Hadrian to act off them.
The striking aspect of the play is in its set dressing—the lavish bedspread and potted plants conjure an image of Egyptian luxury. Sebastian Halbach sits in the corner, melancholically running his bow along his cello. The musical accompaniment elevates the beauty and gravity of the play tenfold, but his presence is another reminder of the opulence and depravity of the imperial court: on a fictional level, he is another faceless servant bound to Hadrian’s whims, forced to play until the emperor grows tired of it.
Antinous’s lush production quality is shocking as well as beautiful: the final tableau is one of blood and beauty. But it is a tableau that is tremendously thin. The show is only three-quarters of an hour, and you can feel the absence of a typical play’s runtime. Antinous is a candy—sweet and addicting but begging for more substance. Had the show been extended and the thorny questions of power and grief explored in more depth, the experience could have been otherworldly. For now, Antinous is a strikingly beautiful teaser—one only wishes we could stay longer.
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