Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on a strangely inconsistent season at the Globe

As the Royal Shakespeare Company and its theatres approach physical and artistic meltdown, Shakespeare's Globe is fitfully coming into its own. This year's "Celtic Season" mimics the once traditional RSC practice of mounting linked plays, although their shared "Celtic" elements are not in fact highlighted. Nor is there any consistency of artistic or playing style, given that the three are performed by separate companies and under different "Masters of Play" (Globespeak for "directors"). While King Lear marks an assured coming of age for the five-year-old theatre, Macbeth and Cymbeline are adolescent oddities.

In Lear, at least, the visual style is convincingly "Celtic", with splendidly swooping dresses and an ingenious wooden back-set (Master of Design: Hayden Griffin). This works to excellent effect in the scene in which Lear and his "riotous knights" arrive at Goneril's house, charging across the yard in vast cloaks of animal skin and kicking around a primitive-looking football, evoking a different kind of "Celtic season". Even the normally robust groundlings cower away from Lear's retinue of large and baying football supporters who, in authentic Globe style, make up for their small number in noise and vigour. The Lear set and costumes harmonise reasonably well with the fussy dried foliage that adorns all the theatre's galleries this year, and which sometimes obscures sightlines.

Both the director, Barry Kyle, and lead actor, Julian Glover, are RSC veterans. It shows. The movement and ensemble playing are first rate, the verse speaking assured, and the pace is energetic and varied. Glover is in more than one sense the strongest Lear I have seen. He is far too intelligent to fall for any of the stale jokes and riddles of his elderly Fool (John McEnery), even though he depends emotionally on his companionship; and he is physically powerful enough to make his entrance in the final scene with Cordelia draped across his shoulders like a newly killed deer. While Glover lacks the Alzheimer-like vulnerability that distinguished Nigel Hawthorne's Lear at Stratford in 1999, his unusually self-aware and intelligent interpretation highlights other aspects of the text. His thoughtfulness works well, for instance, in the sadistic/therapeutic taunting of the blinded Gloucester, which seems by no means unconscious or accidental. In bedlam madness, his mimicking of Poor Tom is all the more distressing for the sense that he is carefully acting out an earlier decision: "I shall have such revenges on you all . . . O Fool! I shall go mad!" For Glover's Lear, mental decay is not inevitable, but a "chosen behaviour".

Other key players in Lear have developed their skills almost entirely at the Globe - notably Claire van Kampen, whose music supports the production's energy and coherence. The excellent Edmund, Michael Gould, who has fully mastered the art of "working" the encircling audience, has had previous experience at the Globe, the National and the Swan in Stratford, but the equally excellent Edgar, Paul Brennan, has performed neither at the Globe nor with the RSC. Edgar's sudden metamorphosis from bland, slightly dim-seeming young nobleman to wildly manic beggar is wonderfully accomplished by Brennan. In the clear light of a summer afternoon, Poor Tom's self-lacerations and jerky fits of demonic possession are visible and embarrassing in just the right ways - no tricks of lighting or make-up here, just virtuoso "physical" acting. The Globe's openness also fosters a special kind of emotional receptivity in its audience. If, as A L Rowse used to claim, it is a mark of the true Celt to express violent but contradictory emotions, this Lear makes Celts of us all, laughing, cringing, weeping in turn, and finally freezing with shock at the "image of that horror".

In Macbeth, in contrast, there is no horror at all. The Master of Play, Tim Carroll, reduces the tragedy to a series of lightweight cabaret turns and drama school exercises. Everyone wears evening dress; social distinctions are scarcely marked; and characters, when not "in play", are ranked in straight lines on upright chairs, sometimes wearing party hats. This production did nothing for me, and I found the device of throwing a pebble into a tin bucket to indicate that a character has been killed particularly silly. Nevertheless, the ensemble playing is excellent; a few players - especially Eve Best as Lady Macbeth - make an emotional impact; on the night, some of the audience seemed to be enjoying it more than I was.

Cymbeline, described as "very playful" by the director, Mike Alfreds, is lighter still. If it were performed in a studio theatre by a no-budget "fringe" company, it might seem rather praiseworthy. But, in the Globe's huge, three-dimensional space, with its overwhelming decor and architecture, this minimalist production - using only six performers, identically clad in cream silk pyjamas - seems little more than a vacuous exercise in actorly acting. Cymbeline is a play in which costumes and props figure crucially. It is not a good text to which to apply a Peter Brook-style experiment. Even the usually compelling Mark Rylance seems to be performing empty stunts. His throttled delivery of such speeches as Posthumus's great rant against women falls remarkably flat, seeming to express no inner darkness.

A mixed verdict, then, on this "Celtic Season", with its "matter and impertinency mixed". And I wonder how those benefactors who, between them, have contributed millions of pounds to the construction of the Globe feel about a programme in which some of the theatre's playing spaces, such as the upper and inner stages, are never used.

The Celtic Season runs at the Globe Theatre, London SE1 (020 7401 9919) until 23 September

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