[In the following excerpted review, Wolf assesses Tim Carroll's production of The Two Noble Kinsmen at the Globe Theater, offering his praise of Jasper Britton's performance as Palamon and finding the production as a whole “enchanting.”]

Among the various criticisms made of Shakespeare's Globe over the four seasons that the rebuilt playhouse has been attracting summertime hordes, one lament has more or less stuck: the theater's inability to attract name performers to a venue seemingly bigger than any individual who might appear there. (Vanessa Redgrave's presence this summer as Prospero was very much the starry exception, not the rule.) Still, as the Royal Shakespeare Co. learned ages ago, if you're not going to entice the heavy hitters, why not do the next best thing and create them? With that in mind, one will remember the Globe's Y2K repertoire as the season that cemented artistic director Mark Rylance's very real stature even as it heralded the thirty something Jasper Britton as a star.

Son of Tony Britton, the long-established English thesp, Britton fils is hardly unknown. Last season, he was a more-than-reliable participant in Trevor Nunn's inaugural National Theater ensemble, playing (among other roles) Shakespeare's sore-ridden Thersites and, later, a duck-hungry cat—the latter as part of the menagerie in the Olivier Award-winning musical, “Honk!” And in the Globe's season-opening Tempest, Britton cut the best Caliban I have yet seen—a mud-caked, half-naked creature as prone to poetry as he was to a guttural growl.

Virtually all the Globe company—Redgrave excepted (her next venture, the Trevor Nunn-National Theater The Cherry Orchard opens in three weeks)—have been cast across two productions, so it's with great warmth that one welcomes Britton back in The Two Noble Kinsmen, along with Tim Carroll's entire production. The likable curiosity that is the Shakespeare-John Fletcher text is not easily separated from Britton and Co.'s playing of it. “My argument is love,” soliloquizes Britton's imprisoned Palamon, nephew to Theban king Creon and friend-turned-rival to his newly banished cousin, Arcite (Will Keen). And with Britton in the driver's seat (as he speaks it, a potentially banal utterance like “oh, good morrow” sounds inimitably droll), the play brooks little debate: love's ardor—and its attendant risks—have rarely been so enchanting.

Those perils, as it happens, are sizable, including a joust to the death, not to mention an admirer in demented pursuit—Kate Fleetwood's vibrantly acted Jailer's Daughter, a sort of hyper-bawdy Ophelia—who responds (typical Shakespeare flourish, this) to the subterfuge of disguise. And yet, one is always aware of an unabashed romanticism underscoring even the doomiest moments in a rewrite of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale that a rain-soaked evening—of which this London summer has had no shortage—can't keep from seeming choice.