Julius Caesar By William Shakespeare; Directed by David Muse Antony and Cleopatra By William Shakespeare; Directed by Michael Kahn Both shows in repertory at Sidney Harman Hall to July 6 The aristocracy is revolting in two of Shakespeare's Roman plays.

If Brutus is the noblest Roman of them all, then it stands to reason that Mark Antony has less nobility about him, but it’s an interesting wrinkle to make him a flat-out Machiavel. In Julius Caesar, the first half of the Shakespeare Theatre’s Roman Repertory at Harman Hall, Andrew Long’s Antony seems a genuine friend to Caesar at the start, counseling, protecting, soothing, even reaching out gently to still the emperor’s trembling hand so others won’t glimpse his frailty.

Later, upon seeing the savagery wrought by Brutus and his allies on March’s Ides, Antony sheds what appear to be real tears for a mentor lost. And when he brandishes Caesar’s will during his funeral oration, regaling the crowd with tales of their assassinated leader’s largesse, his grief feels palpable. You still have to credit him with being a wily manipulator as he whips the Roman rabble into a frenzy while claiming to lack Brutus’ gift for oratory, but his cause seems just, his emotions real.

Until, that is, the bloodthirsty mob rushes off to do its dirty work—his dirty work, really—and this Antony lets us see that the “will” he held up to them was blank parchment. He’s no statesman championing the little people of Rome but a mere operator, a crafty, unprincipled politician, as disreputable as the folks he claims are sullying the republic for which he stands.

How this spinmeister spins off into irrelevance and impotence will be the stuff of the repertory’s second half. Antony and Cleopatra will pick up the story a few years later, with Antony in thrall to a devious Egyptian queen who is not about to be out-manipulated in her own court. The lovers will prove no match for Octavius (Aubrey K. Deeker), the Roman general Antony bosses around so dismissively here. But all of that must wait; there’s a revolt to be put down first.

It’s a revolt that never generates much heat in David Muse’s staging, led by Tom Hammond’s stiff, uncharismatic Brutus, against Dan Kremer’s distracted, similarly unprepossessing Caesar. Both men, surrounded by followers nearly as undifferentiated as their senatorial togas, appear impressive mostly when situated on balconies, high above the throng. And when lesser folks stand out, it’s not always in ways that are dramatically useful. Scott Parkinson’s Cassius has a lean and mostly petulant look, Nancy Rodriguez turns Portia’s pleas to Brutus into a florid, woe-struck aria.

Still, there’s often an eloquence of gesture when Muse finds ways to blend intimacy into the surrounding spectacle, seen in Caesar’s brusque impatience on the morning of his assassination as he shrugs off both barbering attendants and his wife (a wonderfully natural Kim Martin-Cotten), and again in the shock with which he realizes there’s a knife in a hand he’s reached out to for support.

Otherwise, the pageantry in Caesar keeps you forever looking ahead to scenes that haven’t yet played. If the director has sufficient multitudes backstage that he can turn the assassination scene quasi-operatic, with a dozen Roman senators frozen in horror as seven of their brethren plunge daggers into Caesar, it stands to reason he’ll be able to muster quite a crowd for the funeral orations. And when you see 40 or so onlookers perched on balconies and staircases lending Antony their ears, it’s hard not to anticipate how grand they’ll all look once Jennifer Moeller has attired them in leather breastplates and feathered helmets for the battle scenes. (The reality proves disappointing in that last instance, with sparsely populated, twilit clashes waged in slow-motion.)

But the massing of multitudes is just one of the requirements of a persuasive Julius Caesar, and as grand as this one often looks, it can be awfully static when folks aren’t rushing either on- or offstage.

Antony and Cleopatra By William Shakespeare; Directed by Michael Kahn Both shows in repertory at Sidney Harman Hall to July 6

The young firebrand who mounted the podium to importune his friends, Romans, and countrymen is a middle-aged wreck by the time he’s mounting the Queen of the Nile, and therein lies the fascination of playing Shakespeare’s tragic toga parties in tandem.

In Antony and Cleopatra, the master manipulator has frittered away any street cred he had with his fellow generals and has seemingly also lost his gift for public gab. Challenge him now, and he summons up no oratorical bombast, no cagey spinning. Oh, he can charm Octavius when called home to Rome, but he’s quit worrying about distinctions between republics and empires, or even about his duty. His sense of honor will come back when all else has been lost, but for the moment, he has abandoned himself to pleasure and to indulging the whims of a singular Egyptian temptress.

Cleopatra, in Suzanne Bertish’s grandly slatternly portrayal, is a diminutive trollop in gold lamé, past her salad days perhaps, but still very much in her prime. Often comic in early scenes, but growing into the majesty required of tragedy by evening’s end, she is a wildly contradictory, even a neurotic creature, one moment flirtatious, the next demanding; a girlish coquette as she enters a room, a ferocious inquisitor when someone else joins her; jealous and loving by turns, temperamental by habit.

Small wonder that her “infinite variety” has Antony so unbalanced, he scarcely knows where he stands. Let them agree to part, and she’s already pulling him back even as she bids him go. Let her begin a lengthy compliment in a seductive purr, and that purr will last right up until the final word erupts in a shriek, altering the meaning of every syllable that’s gone before.

But if keeping Antony off-kilter is an effective strategy for keeping him around, it will also prove their mutual undoing. Her unpredictability is a liability on the battlefield, forcing him to second-guess and lose focus. Long-buried notions of honor can then surface to destroy him.

But along the way, director Michael Kahn can revel in the romantic byplay, and the soldierly carousing that makes Antony and Cleopatra such an unorthodox, intimate epic. He has a high old time with a sequence in which Bertish’s jealous queen forces a terrified messenger (a quivering Scott Parkinson) to describe Antony’s lovely Roman wife. And a scene in which the Roman leaders, in a rare moment of cooperation, party with the rebellious Pompey (a regal Craig Wallace) becomes an occasion for raucous drinking games. Ted Van Griethuysen’s Lepidus gets amusingly plastered, with Antony his willing enabler, while Deeker’s priggish Octavius, who has often seemed to have something of David Hyde Pierce’s superciliousness about him, suddenly discovers an inner Niles that has nothing to do with Egypt.

If that scene is brightly comic, it also allows Kahn to illustrate the differences that will divide this Roman triumvirate as the arc of history swings back toward tragedy. That Lepidus will be sidelined, that Octavius’ chilly reserve will stand him in good stead for the battles to come, and that Antony’s libertine impulses will cripple him in those same battles, all is clear even as the laughter fades.

Leaving only Cleopatra to juggle the world’s contradictions. In the play’s final third, done in by her need to claw at the world for all it has to offer, she must morph from what Kenneth Tynan called “one of the great sluts of world drama” to a genuinely tragic figure. Bertish manages the transformation with a striking economy, simply stilling herself by stages—from dervish, to siren, to grief-stricken survivor—until she is left a figure in whom nothing flashes but her eyes, and finally those, too, are still.