Alfreds's approach imposes visual unity on a play that Dr Johnson accused of "unresisting imbecility" - a play that yokes together Britain and Rome, Holinshed and Boccaccio, classical antiquity and the Renaissance. But his method also allows for lightning transitions: when the scene shifts from Cymbeline's British court, a gong is struck, an actor announces "Rome", and we're there in two seconds. When Shakespeare demands that "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning", an actor simply advances downstage, flings his arms skywards, and we accept his godliness.
This method unifies a kaleidoscopically restless play. The only problem is that, in a company where all actors are supposedly equal, some are more equal than others. Mark Rylance - playing Cloten, Posthumus and a physician - demonstrates a transformative energy that dominates proceedings in a way we've scarcely seen since the heyday of Donald Wolfit. His Cloten, with gaping mouth and prognathous jaw, is a masterly study of vengeful idiocy. His Posthumus turns into a crazed Leontes. Even his doctor, by the simple device of turning to the audience to say of Cymbeline's wicked queen, "I do not like her", brings the house down. Wonderful to watch, but Rylance might usefully curb his exuberant inventiveness - symbolised by Cloten scratching his genetalia when referring to his stepfather's "testiness" - in the interests of company style.
At its best, the production achieves a resonant clarity. John Ramm's Iachimo, indecently straddling the sleeping Imogen, makes us believe in the trunk through which he has entered her bedroom. Sprightly, cartwheeling Jane Arnfield only has to say "Enter Imogen, dressed as a man" for us to accept it. And if the multiple revelations of the final act lead to escalating hysteria, it's more a comment on the Globe's self-consciously jolly audience than on the production - although I question the robust humour of spectators who roar when Posthumus sends the disguised Imogen skidding violently across the stage. But at least Alfreds shows us that the Globe can work if you treat it as an empty space in which to tell an intriguing story.
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Shakespeare's Globe
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02.08.2000: King of the Globe
02.06.1999: They've rebuilt Shakespeare's theatre
