Cymbeline is hardly a neglected play, but it’s still not one of the more popular of Shakespeare’s late works, so it’s somewhat improbable that this should be the third version of it presented at Shakespeare’s Globe in twelve months. Yet it’s not simply for the sake of ringing the changes that director Matthew Dunster has so gee’d it up.

This is a thoroughly modernised version: text is cut and added to render more comprehensible the plot of an ancient British king manipulated by his wife into resisting the Romans, his daughter’s marital fidelity tested and tricked, exiles and disguises aplenty. The time-of-legends setting becomes contemporary east London, with virtually the entire cast dressed in Adidas and an economy based on white powder and weed. An appropriately “urban” soundtrack of grime and ragga pulses through the proceedings. Semi-transparent polythene sheeting is used (unsuccessfully) as a kind of “wipe” curtain arrangement. The climactic British/Roman battle is staged in flying harnesses, with the kind of moves which in a screen context have become cynically known as “wire-fu”.

Dunster’s production, led by Maddy Hill (formerly Danny Dyer’s daughter in EastEnders) as the now-titular Imogen (simply because she has twice as many lines as her father Cymbeline, played by Jonathan McGuinness), works on its own terms. The trouble is that one wonders – in what has already become a mantra during Emma Rice’s first season at its helm – what the hell it’s doing at the Globe.

Once again, it’s not a matter of snobbery... although, God knows, cutting almost all of the play’s most famous and poignant section “Fear no more the heat o’th’sun” whilst having Imogen lament her supposed widowhood by singing a Daft Punk number does make the nostrils flare in that respect. But no, it’s about waste of potential. When a production like this would work as well in any space of comparable size; when it ignores the configuration, structure and historical aspect of the Globe (that is, when it’s not treating them as problems to be overcome or hidden in polythene)... then where is the identity of the Globe, and what is its particular purpose? Rice hasn’t yet grasped the primacy of this question. She sorely needs to.

Written for the Financial Times.