Antony and Cleopatra – review

2 / 5 stars
Roundhouse, London
Antony and Cleopatra - Roundhouse
Mismatched ... Darrell D'Silva as Antony and Kathryn Hunter as Cleopatra in the RSC's Antony and Cleopatra at Roundhouse, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Tristram Kenton/Guardian

Something has gone badly awry in Michael Boyd's modern-dress revival of Shakespeare's tragedy of passion, politics and performance, which is reduced to farce – a very dull one.

Farce isn't itself a problem; after all, this is a play about delusions and illusions, about the love affair between a drama queen and a great warrior who manages to botch everything he touches, including his own death. There are moments when the comedy is neatly played, such as when the messenger who brings Cleopatra news of Antony's marriage to Octavia has a gun pulled on him. It's a very funny scene, but is also perhaps a sign of desperation in an evening that is taken at breakneck speed yet still manages to drag.

Love, we all know, is blind; opposites are supposed to attract. That still doesn't explain the mismatch between Kathryn Hunter's playful, diminutive Cleopatra, who leaps upon Antony like a gleeful monkey, and Darrell D'Silva's bluff, grizzled soldier. I reckon he'd run a mile from this infuriating, self-dramatising woman, who likes to play the little girl and surrounds herself with an entourage of quick-change artists whose outfits complement her own.

Hunter is unconventional, spiky and mesmerising, and D'Silva is solid and intelligent, but there's zero chemistry between them. They appear to be acting in entirely different plays and prove as fatal to this production as they do to each other. John Mackay's calculating Caesar, Brian Doherty's plain-spoken Enobarbus and Greg Hicks's watchful Soothsayer do good, unshowy work, but the evening lacks spark and confidence, and features one of those wave-a-bit-of-material-around battles that the RSC has been churning out for 30 years.