As the name suggests: the relationship between the title characters is key to the play. When as in this production it fails to ignite, when history’s first great love celebrities seem like strangers, 2 hrs 55 mins can seem a very long time. Never, however, when Josette Simon’s captivating Cleopatra is frolicking on stage.

A web search will provide the highly detailed plot, which encapsulates swathes of history. But Shakespeare’s most poetic play could be entitled Julius Caesar II. The Roman world is ruled by the revengers of Caesar: the assassinated ruler’s adopted son Octavius Caesar, Lepidus and Mark Antony – whose eastern base draws him into contact and bed with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt.

That’s where the sexual chemistry should begin. Antony a great general and a shrewd politician has always had his carousing and womanising side. Faced with the erotic enchantress Cleopatra he surrenders totally to his senses, loosening his hold on political reality. She his wily Serpent of the Nile always has her own perfidious agenda, is never lost for a new ways to provoke, intrigue and seduce him.

Shakespeare’s account of greatness in self-driven decline is sadly fascinating, but also the stuff of rollicking fun. If they do not enjoy themselves along the way, how can we? Physically obsessed with each other they play to the crowd – the court, an exaggerated, version of themselves, sending themselves up, barnstorming their arguments and their reunions.

But there’s no joy on director Iqbal Khan’s stage in Antony Byrne’s Antony. Introvert, self-absorbed and reserving his passion for a few bouts of irritable anger, he is the measure of Josette Simons’ success. Over the top perhaps, but beautiful, tall and stately and dressed to kill, she makes Cleopatra’s capricious behaviour a bewitching entity.

The approach to the play also distorts other characters at the expense of balance. The youthful Octavius Caesar in the person of Ben Allen is open and excitable not – as the text has him, coldly calculating and ruthless as he sets about reducing the ruling triumvirate to one. Whilst Enobarbus, Antony’s loyal fellow soldier is, in the form of Andrew Woodall, hindered by a rough supercilious accent as he delivers ironic commentary and the most famous of the poetry.

The stage is ever busy with historic happenings but the end spares down to the deaths of the lovers and here there’s a surer touch. As the couple separately take their own lives to shape their own destiny, reaffirm their love and deny Octavius his triumph, some of the gravitas is regained. And the steely purpose behind Cleopatra’s apparent capriciousness, is mirrored in moving portrayals by Amber James and Kristin Atherton as her handmaidens.

The stage moves impressively from eastern to Roman architecture and vast atmospheric skies via set designer Robert Innes Hopkins, with the placing of model ships an apt metaphor for the progress of battles. And singer/songwriter Laura Mvula contributes her first musical score with signs of promise.     ★★★☆☆       Derek Briggs     7^th April 2017