Globe: Antony & Cleopatra

Cleopatra, the alluring and fascinatingly ambiguous Queen of Egypt, has bewitched the great Mark Antony, soldier, campaigner and now one of the three rulers of the Roman Empire. When Antony quarrels with his fellow leaders and throws in his lot with Cleopatra, his infatuation threatens to split the Empire in two.

The third of our Roman Tragedies, Antony & Cleopatra picks up Antony’s story many years after Julius Caesar. Virtue and vice, transcendent love and realpolitik combine in Shakespeare’s greatest exploration of the conflicting claims of sex and power, all expressed in a tragic poetry of breath-taking beauty and magnificence. The Globe’s 2014 envisioning of this iconic play encapsulates these themes whilst deftly threading a sense of comedy throughout, and Olivier Award-winner Eve Best’s Cleopatra ‘kisses the audience’ (Guardian) with her ‘magnetically humorous’ (Evening Standard) performance.