Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra - it is one of those defining images of an age of womanhood - of the sultry, dangerous femme fatale who's certain to consume, like a black widow spider, any man who falls into her web. It is an image, an ideal, that any actor playing the Egyptian Queen has to confront, deal with, and overcome, if she's to put her own stamp upon the role.
Frances Barber in the Globe's new Antony & Cleopatra takes to the challenge with a passion. No inch of flesh goes unwriggled, no sideways glance unsmouldered, no lascivious gesture unexercised, but she does all of this with such heart and enthusiasm that it never descends into parody. She's supported beautifully by her two key attendants - Charmian (Frances Thorburn), the young beauty learning from her queen's every move and Iras (Rhiannon Oliver), the plain foil and faintly motherly foil to both of them.
But what is a stage full of male actors - of the ruling Roman triumvirs, Antony, Octavius and Lepidus, and the upstart Pompey - who are deciding the fate of the entire new Roman empire, going to do to match this, to provide balance and matching masculine power to the evening? Neither they, Shakespeare, nor the director Dominic Dromgoole has found an answer to this challenge.
Jack Laskey manages an interesting, charistmatic interpretation of Octavius, the extremely bright but inexperienced young sprog finding his way as a ruler in a dangerous world, knowing too well he can't afford the complications of emotion of any kind. Lepidus is an adequate old drunk; Pompey's short, ringletted appearance adds a dash of piratical glamour.
But Nicholas Jones as Mark Antony — Cleopatra's lover and fellow-ruler, who proves himself inadequate on both levels — doesn't come anywhere near to meeting the dramatic challenge. He might be a formerly great man brought down by his middle-aged passion; he might be a man consumed by the great fire of lust. Instead, he's an addled, weak, vacillating character, vaguely aware that he's charting his own destruction without showing any sign of a will to intervene in the process.
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