[In the following excerpt, Duncan-Jones comments on two productions of Antony and Cleopatra. She expresses disappointment in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1999 staging for its lack of connection to the play's dramatization of important historical events; she also faults Frances de la Tour's lack of charisma in playing Cleopatra, but commends Guy Henry for the depth of his performance in the role of Octavius Caesar. By comparison, Duncan-Jones praises Giles Block's 1999 production of the play at the Globe—which featured male actors in every role—for its rapid pace as well as Mark Rylance's portrayal of Cleopatra.]

Hearing the news of Antony's death, his rival and brother-in-law Octavius Caesar exclaims: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack. The round world / Should have shook lions into civil streets / And citizens to their dens.”

The RSC's Antony and Cleopatra, too, should have made a greater crack. For all its noise and visual busyness, Stephen Pimlott's production feels disappointingly empty and meaningless. Instead of suggesting that “High events as these / Strike those that make them”, Yolanda Sonnabend's vast set, with three outsize perspex panels which mirror and diminish what is acted out in the Shakespeare Theatre's newly extended “round world”, makes the play's bustle seem even more vacuous. Rear-view reflections of characters in deeply receding perspective could act only as ironic comments on their aspirations to greatness if they had appeared great in the first place. Whole areas of significance which one would have thought integral to the play are thrown away in the service of the RSC's increasingly irritating “eclectic” visual style. Instead of re-enacting great historical encounters on the boundaries of Europe and Africa and of history and legend, the company squanders its resources in no particular time and no identifiable place.

Egypt appears to be a colourful gypsy circus encampment, in predictable contrast to the formal stuffiness of Rome, where everyone is dressed in dusty black. But the distinction between the two cultures is uninteresting and readily dissolved. Frances de La Tour's Cleopatra is always energetic, yet never in the least enchanting or mysterious. Instead of approximating to the hieratic goddess marvelled at by Enobarbus (Malcolm Storry) in the “barge” speech, she is just a bossy madam in a rather pretentious brothel who has taken up sister-bonding and New Age therapy at the end of her career. And as “for her own person”, it certainly cannot beggar all description, as Enobarbus claims, for we see virtually all of it in the first few minutes. None of the rituals of dressing and undressing that the text subsequently requires can be of much interest when we have already seen her so scantily clad and embarrassingly self-displayed.

Also, in one vital respect, this commanding actress simply cannot represent that charismatic “serpent of old Nile”; she is entirely European in physique. Given that another play in the RSC's current repertoire, Oroonoko (Times Literary Supplement, May 14), has a superb cast of sixteen black players, this would surely have been the time to do the play properly, with all the Egyptians non-white, and preferably also, as in Oroonoko, palpably non-European in voice and movement. While Shakespeare's Othello, brilliantly played this season by Ray Fearon, is a partly Europeanized Moor, who has served the Venetian State for many years, Cleopatra and her court are genuinely “exotic”. Cleopatra has never been to Rome, and is stubbornly determined to die rather than be enslaved and taken there.

Caesar's astonishment at the erotic beauty and splendour of Cleopatra and her women in death—which has to be cut, here, because of a most unfortunate gimmick requiring characters to walk meekly off-stage when they die—is the amazement of an arrogant European dazzled by the mystique of a great African queen. Deployment of the black performers currently on the RSC's payroll, with the addition of more women, could have set off some exciting interchanges of post-colonial views between the plays in this last summer season of the twentieth century. As it is, this production feels stale and pointless. It's not just the death of Antony that should have “made a greater crack” here, but his life. One can't help feeling sorry for the woefully miscast Alan Bates, whose wig tosses about like the mane of a Shetland pony. So little “presence” does he achieve that it isn't always obvious whether he is on or off stage. Caesar's fortunes are higher than Antony's throughout, for Guy Henry, despite the many absurdities of the production's style, does succeed in delivering some of that depth and historical specificity that the famous title-characters are denied. In his stillness and introspection, he effectively challenges the uninteresting and undignified writhings of the superannuated lovers. He is also lucky to be one of very few performers who is at no point required to fling himself down on the stage and point his rump at the dress circle.

Things are very different at the Globe. Here it does indeed seem that great things are being made and broken. The severe limitations imposed by the theatre's fixed playing space with no scenery, the heavily concealing Jacobean costumes, and to a lesser extent the all-male casting, all contribute paradoxically to the production's success. Such a very complex play can clearly never quite be allowed to speak for itself; some overall vision and control of performance style and pace must be a prerequisite. But while Pimlott's RSC production is undone by an excess of “ideas”, most of which run perversely counter to the text, Giles Block has mastered the play at the Globe with a light hand, and has not been afraid to let the actors entertain us. Where scenes or speeches emerge as wholly or partly comic, they are allowed to be so. Antony's bungled suicide comes across like a scene in the worst sort of minor opera, except that we are entirely free to laugh at it, which is a relief. His precarious abseiling up to the Monument is also, as it should be, a nail biting stunt—“here's sport indeed!”—whereas the episode as played in the RSC version is simply baffling. When celebrated battles have to be depicted with barely a dozen players, opposing armies clank and clatter at high speed on and off stage, sometimes also shouting and yelling off stage, with many near-collisions both with each other and with the groundlings. This generates a high level of excitement, actively assisted by the music, which is superb throughout. It's worth missing coffee in the ten-minute intervals in order to hear more of the Globe's musicians, especially the trumpeters; and the dance at the end provoked such an enthusiastic response that I wondered whether the theatre should be used sometimes for interactive early music concerts.

Fast pace and a tone that wobbles perpetually between tragedy and farce, with the odd bat's squeak of high camp, keep the play interesting and captivating throughout. Mark Rylance's Cleopatra works almost perfectly, not so much because he is male, as because he is a versatile actor who turns out to be extremely well cast in the role, which yields surprising echoes of his famous 1989 RSC Hamlet-in-pyjamas. Here is another fascinatingly manic attention-seeker who pits his/her childish egotism against the pomposity of the grown-ups. This sweet-faced, skipping Queen could easily have hopped forty paces in the public street, and her perpetual quick-witted teasing of Antony and of the un-fortunate Messenger has about it something of Hamlet's cruel wind-up of Polonius. Rylance's Cleopatra is flamboyantly regal, yet never pompous. She wears her eight colourful and ingenious costumes (designed by Jenny Tiramani) with joyful assurance, and is never swamped or upstaged by them. However, she does somewhat upstage her sombre Antony (Paul Shelley), who could have done with a comparably appealing range of outfits to identify him as a truly Herculean hero, not just a Roman also-ran. Though he delivers his lines clearly and carefully, he—like Bates—fails to convince us that he either is, or ever has been, “famous”. He also seems distinctly uncomfortable in the love scenes. Apart from Rylance's Cleopatra, the Globe production is more distinguished for its confident and relaxed ensemble playing than for individual performances. It is curious, given the theatre's structure, how rarely any of the actors make eye-contact with the audience. Certain scenes, such as that of Enobarbus's solitary heartbreak, would have been very much more powerful if they had been allowed to do so.