It’s hilarious. It’s also annoying that it’s so hilarious. Jonathan Munby’s earthy and glamorous production of Antony and Cleopatra goes almost too far to please the Globe’s fidgety, giggly crowds.
The Egyptian queen is often treated as a female Lear, a trophy role, a lap of honour for a transatlantic facelift as she enters her bus-pass years. But Eve Best is the same age, around 40, as the real thing, and she invests the character with a fine mixture of romanticism, majesty and erotic guile. She also has a strong Home Counties branding. Slender-limbed and deeply tanned, she drifts around her palace in a range of floaty white linen dresses. Her dark-brown hair extensions wouldn’t disgrace a Clairol advert. In battle she appears in a pirate’s cut-down trousers with an armour breastplate sculpted around her shapely torso. Her performance hugs the role just as closely.
When Antony departs for Rome, she quizzes a spy about his activities and her comic frustration is underpinned by real melancholy. Later her amorous isolation and her single-minded defiance are beautifully judged.
But where Best never loses decorum Clive Wood, as Antony, never finds it. Nor even tries to. He conceives the role as an Essex hooligan leading a gang of roisterers on a Club Med booze-cruise. There’s not much sexual magnetism between his wrinkled raunchiness and Best’s delicate and dreamy beauty. It’s like watching a spare Middleton sister forced into a shotgun wedding with Sid James’s cocky stepbrother.
And Wood’s larf-a-minute interpretation cuts against the text, which constantly emphasises Antony’s nobility of spirit. Even his direst foes attest to his charm, generosity and selflessness. And Shakespeare’s language reaches heights almost unparalleled in English poetry in his attempts to depict Antony as a romantic apostle of hedonism.
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