A Shakespeare play that too often feels like a duty rather than a pleasure, this drama about love and death on the Nile gets a thrilling production from Braham Murray. The Exchange's in-the-round auditorium comes into its own allowing Egypt and Rome, sex and duty, to co-exist. In Johanna Bryant's clever design the stone floor sports both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Roman numerals, and while Cleopatra performs her drama of love and manipulation on a small scarab-dominated platform, the power plays of Rome are directed like a human chess game from small plinths.
Antony and Cleopatra is not only about the madness of love, but its performance too, and Josette Bushell-Mingo's Cleopatra is indeed a drama queen. You get a real sense of a woman so used to playing a part - majesty meets celebrity - that she is no longer sure what is real. There is something camp and showbizzy about her court. Even the initial, languidly sexual glimpse of her with her lover seems stage-managed. This Cleopatra has an animal magnetism; she pads around like a great cat pretending to be a pussy. She is a woman confident of her power and youth. She is exotic, other, and very dangerous. In other circumstances, this woman could be Medea.
Tom Mannion has the harder task of making Antony seem tragic rather than just a wimp. He does it well, suggesting a decent man floored by a fatal lack of self-knowledge and control. There are other good things too: just as Antony abandons duty for love, so Steven Robertson's cool Caesar abandons love (his sister, Octavia) for duty. There is always an interesting tension between the intelligent and the instinctive, the comic and the tragic, as the production moves towards its climax with the hallucinatory madness of a dream.
· Until April 9. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
