[In the following excerpted review of the Southmark Globe Theatre's all-male production of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Giles Block, Potter praises many of the performances of the major characters, finding in particular that Mark Rylance's Cleopatra uncovered new meaning in the play. Potter comments that the director's vision of the play emphasized the victory of “a gloriously human couple.”]

In its 1999 season the Southwark Globe took up several challenges from its critics: to prove that it could do Shakespearean tragedy as well as comedy, to adopt more Elizabethan conventions (in this case, all-male casts for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), and to perform a new play. To make room for the last of these, which opened after I left, there were no plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries this year; I suspect that they will mostly be relegated to the small indoor theater when it finally materializes, and that the same will be true of new plays. The Globe theater has also taken notice of last season's complaints about problems seeing and hearing the actors. The pillars have new, slimmer bases; though actors can no longer stand on them, a little more of the forestage can now be seen from the side. This year each production has had a “Master of Play” and “Master of Verse,” and the work of these coyly named individuals, especially the latter, has made a difference. While some of the actors occasionally sounded as if they were forcing their voices, most could make themselves heard even above the sound of a helicopter. The stage movement was also much more inventive, with most actors apparently comfortable about playing to the whole of their audience instead of just the quadrant directly in front of the stage. …

… [I]t was Giles Block's production of Antony and Cleopatra that everyone was waiting for. Mark Rylance may or may not have been the age of the now-unknown Jacobean actor who originally played one of the greatest female roles of all time. It didn't matter; his performance as Cleopatra was a genuine revelation of aspects of the play and the role that I have never seen exploited before. It gained, for instance, from the audience's double awareness of character and actor, particularly when he was physically threatening other characters or doing one of Cleopatra's quick transitions between sinking into a faint and deciding not to bother after all. This Cleopatra, as several reviewers said, really did look as if she might decide at any time to hop forty paces through the public street. Barefoot much of the time and dressed like a gypsy, she played the second scene with the messenger wearing chopines and a feathered headdress, thus carefully giving herself every advantage when she asked whether Octavia was “as tall as me.” Following Plutarch's account, Rylance also gave us a Cleopatra who had shaved her head and lacerated her face in mourning for Antony, thus making the final transformation with robe and crown even more stunning than usual.

In most productions it is Antony who is shown to be suffering from divided longings and Cleopatra who acts on blind impulse. Here, however, Paul Shelley's Antony became the object of love—both Cleopatra's and Enobarbus's—rather than an autonomous subject. He was a creature of instinct, never needing to brood over what he was going to do next. His generosity on hearing that Enobarbus had left him was so rapid and spontaneous that it went largely unnoticed, as did his instant forgiveness when he learned that Cleopatra was still alive after all; the death of Eros (who slit his own throat) shocked the audience more than it did him. In all three cases I would have liked him to take a few seconds longer to register, or let the audience register, the enormity of what he was not saying. Cleopatra was allowed far greater interiority; she actually heard Enobarbus's sarcastic comments on Antony's deteriorating judgment (usually treated as an aside) and her gradual realization that her lover was no longer a superman gave her a shared understanding, delicately indicated, of Enobarbus's state of mind. This sympathy between the two people who love Antony most is not in the text, but then this play, unlike Julius Caesar, has a subtext—at least, that's how I would describe such lines as Cleopatra's “Then Antony—but now—Well, on.”

There were other fine performances. John McEnery's Enobarbus was admirably clear, understatedly funny, and able to span the barge speech, the sarcastic one-liners, and the difficult death scene. Mark Lewis Jones, good in all his roles, stood out as the amiably second-rate Pompey. Danny Sapani as Charmian revealed a comic range that he had conscientiously repressed as Brutus, while James Gillan was a remarkably convincing Iras. As the messenger who gets mauled by Cleopatra, Roger Gartland had a wonderful moment in their second scene, when she offered him gold for the second time and he registered a horrified suspicion that the cycle of reward and attack was about to start again. On the other hand, I found most of the Romans, especially Octavius (Ben Walden), somewhat colorless, and I suspect that the director was simply not very interested in this half of the conflict. In some productions this would have been a disaster. For this one it didn't seem to matter. I have rarely seen an interpretation so little concerned with the difference between the Roman and Egyptian worldviews.

Was the final effect tragic? Is it ever? Block seems to me to see the play as the triumph of a gloriously human couple. The speed at which events moved, matched by that of the characters themselves as they danced and dashed across their world stage, made it easier to enjoy the comedy than to respond to the sense of “greatness going off” or the suggestiveness of the moment (surprisingly ineffective, at least in the previews) when music from under the earth hints at the end of an era. This may be why the most moving part of the play was the minitragedy of Enobarbus, who ironically dies in public yet so lost in his own grief as to be unaware that he has an audience. Perhaps we are overinclined to associate tragedy with interiority and silence and do not know how to respond to a play that takes place entirely in public. Yet the company tried to play as many lines as possible out front. They duly glared at us whenever they complained about the unreliability of the common people; the anonymous servant's lament that Lepidus should “be called into a huge sphere and not … be seen to move in't” was played as a joke about acting minor parts at the Globe; after his one military victory, Antony assured us (rather unconvincingly) that he owed it all to us. The fact that such moments could be achieved only by forcing the lines marks the difference between Antony and Cleopatra and the season's other plays. Both its historical setting and its Jacobean context imply an audience whose role is (as Philo says at the start) to “behold and see” rather than to affect events. …