[In the following excerpt, Macaulay reviews Michael Attenborough's 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra. The critic has high praise for Sinead Cusack's representation of Cleopatra, noting the freshness of her delivery, her devotion to the language of the play, and the variations in her tone and demeanor.]

Sinead Cusack is surely the most beautiful woman I've seen playing Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and her speaking of the lines—though here the competition is yet stiffer—may well be the most beautiful I've heard. In truth, I can't quite believe in her as the Egyptian queen—in voice and looks she is, even with dark wig and glamorous raiment, so very Celtic—but she's so intelligent and skilful an actress that it's impressive how often I suspend disbelief. Shakespeare, indeed the Royal Shakespeare Company, used to be her home terrain some 20 years ago, and she returns now to both playwright and troupe with only more authority, wisdom and style than before.

How many of Cleopatra's lines she sends winging out into the air with fresh impact as both sound and sense: “Now I feed myself / With most delicious poison”, “Then is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?” and “O, such another sleep, that I might see / But such another man!” were just my three favourites.

She has vowel and syllable in ideal balance, she lightly highlights assonances and alliterations, and gorgeously she weights this word or rhythm without ever distorting the phrase. She has wit, irony, rage, grandeur, intimacy, and sorrow. When she says, preparing to die, “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life,” she has such lyricism that you hardly realise that actually she is air but not fire.

As for her beauty—even though her shoulder/neck area has a tension that does not become a Cleopatra—your eye gorges on the brightness of her eyes, the breadth of her cheekbones, the full Cupid's bow of her mouth, the glow of her skin, the sensational curves and line of her naked back.

She listens more arrestingly than most other actors speak—I remembered how Rudolf Bing wrote of Maria Callas in Il Trovatore listening to Jussi Bjorling singing his aria to her: “He didn't know what he was singing about, but she did”—and she listens in character, listens differently in fact to different characters. Her doe-eyed act of demure fealty to Caesar's envoy Thidias is exquisitely ironic to behold; her solemnly lavish display of veneration for the conquering Caesar himself is in quite a darker key, though ironic too. Now and then, as when she chases the Messenger with a dagger, she can cut fast and loose (though in general she is a little too measured). And she springs surprises—as when she does a slow backbend that reaches the floor, flips right over in the next beat, and promptly hops away, calling “Let's to billiards!”—surprises that are just right for the role.

An enthralling, illuminating performance, it isn't moving. Stuart Wilson is physically her match as Antony, but never vocally. He speaks in a tight squillo tenor with a narrow range—he stands and breathes so well that you're puzzled that this hard constricted sound comes out—and he hasn't the Shakespearian experience to make all his words sound clearly. Like her, only more so, he needs to let the role relax and breathe. And to make us believe in some serious chemistry between them. Give the production a few weeks, and this could yet occur.

Michael Attenborough's direction, Es Devlin's designs, and Paddy Cuneen's music all pull the play in several different—if glamorous—directions. Where are we? The set's big silhouette map of the Mediterranean is distracting, especially in its hazy misconception of the Aegean and Asia Minor; Roman, Egyptian, and other scenes are more confused than distinguished; and the Egyptians go in for slow jazz at home and Central African dance display abroad. It's not a bad production, but it's not a resolved one.

Clive Wood is a striking Enobarbus: so communicative, so open-hearted. But he, too, has more to find in this role: more poetry, more force, more tragedy. Trevor Martin's basso profondo Soothsayer becomes a mysterious Messenger of Death: more striking than revealing. Cusack's Cleopatra is not the most “right” piece of casting in this staging, but it sheds the most light on this great play.

Randall Jarrell called this “the supreme literary expression of our culture”, and the production does nothing so wrong that I ever question that opinion while in the theatre. If there are two questions that most obsessed Shakespeare, they are “Who is worthy to rule?” and “What does love do to us?”; and there is no play in which both questions come together more potently than Antony and Cleopatra.