Alex Strouts and Caitlin Carr sat at a folding table in Clare College’s Blythe Room on Tuesday morning, calmly conducting a dervish of actors milling around purposefully to 80s music. I asked the pair, co-directors of the Pembroke Players’ upcoming Antony ϟ Cleopatra, what this was all about. Caitlin explained they were getting into character; Alex, tapping at her laptop, put on New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. “Okay guys”, she said to the whirling mass of thespians: “Blue Monday – this is war music!”

Alex and Caitlin have gone whole-hog with the 80s theme in their production of the 17th-century tragedy. Rome is, in a sense, midtown New York: fat-cat, supply-side, and conformist – the 80s as the decade of Reagan and Thatcher. Egypt seems somewhere further downtown: camp, sensuous, wracked by crisis. The play will be staged at Pembroke New Cellars, where extensive use of music, lights, and projection will amplify the pop-culture motifs.

Caitlin noted that her co-director first came up with the idea of an 80s Shakespeare after reading Julius Caesar: “it was reminding her of certain 80s power ballads”, said Carr, “I think there’s that kind of buildup of emotion, and the drama of it, and that ‘over-topness’ – there’s so much 80s media that’s kind of really dark, but that also really builds, and it’s kind of cathartic”. “New wave”, interjected Alex. The directors painted their Octavius Caesar as a Margaret Thatcher, while Antony, according to Alex, “has a fluidity between a rock star and a politician”.

Seth Kruger, who’s playing Antony, sees the character as a go-between for the play’s two very different worlds. “Aside from dyeing my hair for the first time in my life”, he noted, “I’ve been walking around Cambridge and even going clubbing in some of the androgynous makeup we’re using for Antony. It’s very important for me to get comfortable with Antony’s easy gender fluidity and with the feeling of having people looking at you, with this striking hair and makeup, and trying to work you out”.

Beatriz Santos, as Cleopatra, moons over Antony for one second, and rails against him the next. Cagey, cornered, she is a powerful sovereign on whom the detachment of rule weighs heavily. It’s interesting to ponder what the Elizabethan audience would make of her, at once mother, leader, and fully sexual. Egypt’s oriental ‘otherness’ surely plays a role in making Cleopatra possible, and in making it untenable for Antony to keep a foot in both worlds.

Playing up to expectations is a key theme all around; Alex and Caitlin point out that “cheesy music” comes on when a Roman delegation gets plastered “playing up to this idea of Egypt”, and suggested their model for the marriage between Antony and Octavia was “Lady Diana and Prince Charles – the ephemerality and the fact that it’s over in a second”.

At a time when the 80s seem to be coming back with a vengeance – not just in pop culture, but with the election of that iconic 80s New York personality, Donald Trump, as leader of the (erstwhile) free world – a retro Antony ϟ Cleopatra, embracing not just the cheesiness of that decade’s music but also the dark cultural forces lurking within, seems poignant, and maybe even necessary.

The Pembroke Players’ Antony ϟ Cleopatra will be playing in Pembroke New Cellars, 22nd – 26th November