It isn't very often that a Shakespeare revival gets as high praise as Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic's "Antony and Cleopatra." Reading the superlatives leaves anyone acquainted with Shakespeare or with acting standards in a quandary after he sees the play: how can he reconcile the rave reviews with the obvious and fatal shortcomings of the current production?

Miss Cornell and her husband shot for the stars when they put this work on their always ambitious schedule. "Antony" has never been a success other than artistically, and the acting and staging problems it presents are brutal. The episodic nature of the action, the impossibility of getting across where or when many of the play's 42 scenes take place, and the sublety of the great character-creations all make the staging of the piece tremendously difficult.

McClintic uses standard devices to clear up plot troubles. A few cuts here and there, a minimum number of transpositions, and some scenes played in front of the curtain are employed successfully to keep the action understandable and more or less continuous. The only bad cut is at the very end, which is foolishly speeded-up. The general style and the acting, rather that the plot, are the play in any case.

Miss Cornell is the biggest disappointment of the evening. She seems temperamentally unable to express the corrupting sensuality of Cleopatra, or her intrinsic failure to see life from a consistent or serious point of view. She throws away good lines, looks foolish when she tries to act silky, and frequently seems lost in the part, In her biggest dramatic scenes she turns her role from an illusion to a mass of words by forcing her voice and manner. Miss Cornell's tricks and gestures, effective in other roles, show her in this supreme part as not a great tragic actress after all.

What success the acting does achieve is Godfrey Tearle's. Although by no means possessed of a complete conception of the part of Antony, Tearle has great dignity and assurance and a superb voice which makes his portrayal always satisfying, at least from a poetic point of view.

Below the top level the acting falls into the morass of undisciplined and inconsistent characterizations typical of American Shakespeare companies, which do not have the acting tradition and standards which hold British productions together.

Kent Smith is impressively military as Enobarbus; his greatest flaw is a continuous attempt to make the speech sound "realistic," a style which crushes the beautiful verse of such speeches as "The barge she sat in ..." Ralph Crinton as Oetavius is excessively noisy--perhaps more insistent than calculating. Lenore Ulrie's Charmian, complete with New York accent and undulating movements, is the low point of the performance.

Throughout the production a feeling of unevenness makes itself felt, unevenness in the pace (mostly to rushed), unevenness in the way the verse is road. The settings, while effective in a simple way, are too monotonous for a play with such brilliant potentialities. The total effect, in fact, is of pettiness rather than the richness called for.

Perhaps, despite the inadequate cast in this production, the problems of "Antony and Cleopatra" are too much for the stage. Perhaps it will be up to a super-colossal cast in a super-colossal, non-stagebound movie to achieve the really satisfactory version of this masterpiece that three and one-half centuries on the stage have failed to produce.