Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe inspires almost identical conclusions from critics: a so-so production, perhaps, but as the Express puts it, "dominated... by Frances Barber's wonderfully feisty and fiery star turn... This production should really be renamed Cleopatra and Antony".
Benedict Nightingale of the Times suggests Barber's "superb Cleopatra comes close to putting even [Sarah] Bernhardt in the shade", admiring her "infinite variety" above all when she greets the messenger announcing Antony's marriage to Octavia: "She bites him, kicks him, hurls him against a wall, punches him in the stomach, breaks a staff on his back, and screeches so loudly in his ear that he's half-deafened as well as reduced to palpitating jelly...But a moment later she's on her knees and sobbing."
The Observer's Susannah Clapp says she "skips and snarls and seethes, stretching out both limbs and vowels" through scenes but - as Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph agrees - was ultimately better when Antony was out of the picture. Which, unfortunately for actor Nicholas Jones, was generally held to be true. The Mail's Quentin Letts calls the combination of Barber and Jones "an out and out mismatch", with the Telegraph describing Jones and the other male performers as "a Viagra pill short of full soldierly value". In addition, Paul Taylor in the Independent complains he "sounds as though he hails from a genial career at the Bar rather than from a military past".
Evaluations of the production as a whole range mostly from "uneven" (the Independent) and "neither wretched nor wondrous" (the Telegraph) to "occasionally it's stirring. But never moving" (from the Financial Times's Alastair Macaulay), though the Times decides it is "a fluent, pacy, decently enough acted affair."
