Review: Antony and Cleopatra

With Clive Wood and Eve Best as two of the ancient world's most passionate lovers, Jonathan Munby's production reclassifies Shakespeare's tragedy as a fizzing comedy. Which is not to say that the business of Antony's army joining forces with Cleopatra's navy to fight his fellow Romans is not an act of deadly seriousness. Nor that their deaths are not as devastating to watch as they should be (especially Antony's, witnessed by the love of his life).

But when the sparring couple are together, what they transmit is not so much mutual adoration as relief that each has found in the other an equal. And we are not just talking about an equality in status, but in wit and attitude. In fact, this version of possibly the greatest romance in the classical canon has more in common with the cynicism and sarcasm of Elyot and Amanda in Noel Coward's Private Lives than with love-struck victims of their own emotions. These two would never let such self-indulgences get the better of them.

Munby also injects some beautifully judged flourishes that serve to illustrate the thoughts of Shakespeare's lovers. When Wood's macho Antony and Jolyon Coy's uptight Caesar calm their tense stand-off with the agreement that Antony will wed Caesar's frosty sister Octavia, she silently glides though the scene like a thought in the mind rather than a character on the stage. And when news reaches Antony that Enobarbus has deserted him, the old friends face each other, though only in Antony's imagination.

The key to this production lies in undermining the po-faced earnestness that usually characterises dramas about great love. Best's Cleopatra even kisses a member of the audience as if to prove that she can't be doing with all that lovey dovey nonsense.