Andrew Long, Ted van Griethuysen, and Aubrey K. Deeker form an uneasy alliance in Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Carol Pratt.

Antony and Cleopatra is a sprawling, lumbering beast of a play — war, international intrigue, doomed love — but the best stuff in the Shakespeare Theatre’s current production is the smallest stuff: he-said/she-said, jealousy, drunkenness. When Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, learns from a rightly mortified messenger that Antony, the Roman General with whom she’s been engaged in a forbidden and yet very public love affair, has married (for the second time), she demands a description of the bride. “What majesty was in her gait?”

“She creeps,” says the messenger (Scott Parkinson), who — like the C.I.A. after a surprise visit from Dick Cheney — instantly perceives his report had better match his ruler’s expectations, the truth of the matter be damned. (As Octavia, the woman of whom the messenger speaks, Kaytie Morris is far easier on the eyes than the Queen’s intelligence would indicate.) And this play is about nothing if not the way personal affections and conflicts can run the ship of state aground.