Well, OK. The new production at Shakespeare's Globe of Antony and Cleopatra—with the much-anticipated casting of Mark Rylance as Cleopatra—really does have its merits. Not only is the Egyptian queen the best role that Rylance has yet given the Globe audience, but more importantly, Giles Block's staging comes nearer than anything hitherto to managing to make that audience take Shakespeare seriously.

You wonder in advance, of course, if Rylance will be either too effeminate in Shakespeare's greatest female role, or too butch. In the event, he is neither. Straightaway, it proves easy to accept the “travesty” convention of man-as-woman. And, by speaking the whole role with a bright tenor delivery, he makes his voice—a wonderfully expressive instrument, but so much better suited to closed auditoria than to this open space—project more successfully than it has in any male role at the Globe. His Cleopatra is sportive, merry, in most of the early scenes; and even as she/he faces defeat and death, she/he is always spontaneous, bright.

Block's production is effective simply because—the pun is unavoidable—he has blocked the action decently and has made his actors stand well. And so the geometries of the theatrical action beam easily outwards into the larger geometries—into the canopied cube of stage space and into the open-topped cylinder of the auditorium. After the fidgety nightmare of Rylance's own production of Julius Caesar this season, this Antony comes as a welcome relief, relatively speaking.

Relatively speaking, however, there is nothing in this Antony and Cleopatra that casts serious new light on to the play. Rylance is better than a few female Cleopatras I have seen, but when I compare him to the greatest Cleopatras of my experience—to Judi Dench, to Vanessa Redgrave, or (this season at Stratford-upon-Avon) to Frances de la Tour—he seems limited, lightweight. You buy Rylance as a woman, but in the way that you buy tall, healthy-looking women playing the fragile heroines of opera. (With his long wig, strong neck, and powerfully cut bodice, he really does resemble Joan Sutherland.)

Block's production, dressed along Jacobean lines by Jenny Tirameni, works, but only in a basic and old-fashioned sense. Half the time it feels like a very good example of boys'-school Shakespeare, the other half like decent old-fashioned rep. Paul Shelley is an efficient but uncompelling Antony: in fact, in the larger scenes I kept thinking “Where's Antony?” (Neither he nor anyone else can show us how to wear a Jacobean hat with any kind of theatrical eloquence.) John McEnery, with his clearcut voice and wry manner, is a fair Enobarbus. Octavia is the first female role at the Globe that Toby Cockerell has not played well (a coarsely assertive reading), but he plays several other roles and strikes wordless magic as a boy with a flag in Antony's army.

The crude vocal styles of Mark Lewis Jones, Benedict Wong, and several other Globe players continue to offend. And why bother with Jacobean costume when your acting ensemble plays in a range of American, Welsh, English, and Oriental accents?

To say that the audience paid more serious attention to this Globe production is also only relatively speaking. During one of my favourite speeches, Antony's “Now we see a cloud that's dragonish”, one of the standees dropped and kicked an empty beer can, two men began a conversation in Spanish, and someone in the galleries let a mobile phone ring for 12 full rings before answering it. The Globe is the brainchild of Sam Wanamaker—but now, alas, he must be rolling in his grave.