There's no doubt that Zerrin Tekindor is a bewitchingly attractive actress, and a good many men in that Saturday matinee audience at the Globe – who audibly included a substantial proportion of her Turkish-speaking fans – would have been quite as unthinkingly happy to fight by sea at her request as was Haluk Bilinger's Antony. A leonine, grizzled, barrel-chested figure, this Antony was a comically susceptible lover first and a doomed world leader only second, if at all. The show opened with the Roman and the Egyptian, surrounded by Cleopatra's female, musical, belly-dancing court, exchanging what were evidently straightforward and sincere endearments (gone was the prefatory disapproving exchange between Demetrius and Philo), and this remained its keynote throughout. Cleopatra eventually applied the asp on the leather chaise longue on which the couple had been seated when Antony dismissed the messenger, and just as the venom took effect Antony, or a comfortably corporeal ghost of him, simply walked back on, reappearing from the dead in the white kaftan he had worn in the first scene. Evidently their mutual self-indulgence would continue for an afterlife even more cosily connubial than the one each separately imagines in the play (see Colour Plate 13).

Actually, to describe this Antony and Cleopatra as ‘the Roman and the Egyptian’ is slightly misleading, since no togas or eagles were on view; Mert Firat's macho and un-Machiavellian Octavius and his faction wore black, but for the most part everyone looked unspecifically Mediterranean, in costumes which could have come from one of the same trunks as those of the Armenian King John. With the play's central opposition thus minimized, this seemed very much an Antony and Cleopatra ‘lite’. The evidently colloquial, prose translation had been shorn not only of passages inconvenient for a company of twelve players but also of passages which might have demanded a genuinely tragic or historical register. The soothsayer was gone; Enobarbus’ Cydnus speech was gone; Octavius’ account of Antony and Cleopatra mustering the kings of the earth for war was gone; the god Hercules forsaking Antony was gone; ‘I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony…’ (5.2.75) was all but gone (Cleopatra's suicide followed Antony's after only a swift intervening interview with Octavius); and the queenly robes for the death scene were gone too.