Kathryn Hunter withdraws from RSC productions

Even at the time it seemed a little strange: the visionary Kathryn Hunter as an oddball Cleopatra in a production that hardly seemed up to the mark either of her performing standards or of her own fabulous Shakespeare staging, a Pericles which was one of the two best things I've ever seen at the Globe.

But she'd been through a good few Antony and Cleopatras before she dropped the bomb yesterday that she was withdrawing from Michael Boyd's long-term company, of which she has been an "artistic associate" since 2008.

The press statement is brief and enigmatic. Boyd's and Hunter's "joint" statement runs thus: "We have not been able to achieve together the full range of ambitions that we shared. We share the disappointment that Kathryn will not be with the company for the [rest of the] Roundhouse season and for the remaining life of the company, and continue to share a mutual regard and respect."

The last-minute withdrawal leaves the understudies to go on for both her roles. Katy Stephens, Rosalind in the current As You Like It, now plays Cleopatra, and Sophie Russell, Audrey to Stephens's Rosalind, acts the Fool to Greg Hicks's King Lear, opening tonight. Now 53, Hunter was the first actress to play Lear professionally, to amazing effect, and has been long linked with the physical theatre movement, including early Complicite where her husband, the RSC actor and movement director Marcello Magni, was also a founder member in the Eighties.

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