It's a Disaster, but the Show Must Go on the Critics Hate 'Antony and Cleopatra' (Left, with Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman) Almost as Much as They Despised Peter O'Toole's 'Macbeth' (Right). but the Actors Still Have to Brave the Audience, Night after Night after Night

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When the National Theatre's new Antony and Cleopatra opened recently, one critic referred to the courting couple, played by Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren, as "a pair of glumly non-mating pandas at London Zoo, coaxed to do their duty". Others were equally damning. The performance was judged to be "rumpled, woebegone", "thoroughly unengaging" and "downright lazy".

But if the critical hyperbole can be fun to read, it constitutes an intricate form of torture for the actors who have to tread the boards each night knowing that they have become the definitive barometer of bad. "That play has to run for a long, long time," says Michael Bogdanov, artistic director of the English …