“Isn’t she great?” boomed an American next to me during the interval. “She’s hilarious!” He wasn’t wrong. We had just seen Egypt’s intoxicating and ultimately tragic queen as the camp diva of all time. Hand on hip and husky voiced, Frances Barber had been strutting the stage in Act One like a classical Alexis Carrington. It was her play, and she’d cry if she wanted to.

The audience was lapping up the high jinks in the Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole’s production, the third in his Edges of Rome season. And Barber didn’t disappoint in displaying the glamour required for one of Shakespeare’s best female roles. Cleopatra’s seductiveness shouldn’t rely on stunning beauty, but on a full package of sensuality, wit and a confidence in her own power. With her fantastic figure, sense of danger and slightly unhinged prettiness, Barber could convincingly have men of a certain age utterly in thrall to her. It certainly felt like down time when she wasn’t on.

And yet, amid the screechingly over-the-top tantrums (Cleopatra half-kills the messenger sent to tell her of Antony’s marriage) and the broad humour, one longed for some decorum, some darkness, which might just hint at the tragic events to come.

This is one of Shakespeare’s most intense and complicated love affairs, a story of an obsession with power and the restrictions placed on a mature relationship by the machinations of harsh diplomacy and realpolitik. Perhaps the needs of the Globe audience mean much playing to the gallery, but here the effect was to flatten out nuance and obscure the layers of purpose that motivate the characters.

Of course, for it to work there has to be, amid the changing loyalties and battles fought, an attraction between the two central characters that could sway history. There is little real sense of that here. As Antony, Nicholas Jones has a strong physical presence, and yet seems oddly lightweight. He is meant to be a hero in decline, but one barely feels a past greatness. Rather than being swept along by Cleopatra, he seems to be passively going with the flow.

In the second half, when the two emerge breastplated for battle with Rome, things sobered up and an epic quality briefly emerged, an achievement on this cramped stage. But it wasn’t sustained. It is a mistake to turn Antony’s suicide attempts into low comedy. Hardly surprising, then, that even when he is dying and hauled up by ropes to Cleopatra’s embrace at the top of her monument, a few titters were heard at a moment that should have some sad grandeur about it.

Other than Jack Laskey’s pinched, pallid formality as Octavius Caesar, there is little scope in this bare, traditional production in which to point up the contrast between the straight authoritarianism of Rome and the exoticism of Egypt. But even if we take that as read, we must feel the power of the central couple’s alliance. Here, Antony needs an injection of urgency, and Cleopatra needs to simmer down.

Antony and Cleopatra, Two stars
Shakespeare’s Globe