I have just watched the first half of the televised Measure For Measure from the Globe directed and starred in by Mark Rylance, the same team, in other words, who did that magnificent Richard II, also on BBC4 TV.

This Measure for Measure has been, for me, somewhat of a disappointment. The funny bits weren't funny enough, and worse, the serious bits werent' serious enough.

David Starkey, commenting at half time, said it all. The basis of the play is that it is set in a world which takes sex seriously, and somehow that has to come across. There are rules for sex, and God help you if you get caught disobeying them. This did not come across here. I thought momentarily that maybe that could be accomplished by setting it in some decaying Muslim Fundamentalist state, which is falling apart but still lashing out with the remnants of its dogmatic certainties. But that wouldn't work because fundamentalist Islam blames women for everything, and in Measure for Measure, Claudio is to be punished for his adultery.

No, all I want to see is a better production. The other commenter, the actress Juliet Stephenson, herself a notable Isabella apparently, said that it was good to see all the arguments so clearly laid out. But they didn't sound clear enough to me.

But now the second half is underway, and Shakespeare's sheer genius as a script writer is now sweeping everyone and everything along, and everything, despite all the confusions of the first half, is being made clear. The underlying situation – so serious for those in it, so weird in the way the Duke set it all up – simply cannot be denied, for all the tittering.

There was much talk at half time of The Duke being James I, but to me he comes across as more like a self-send-up of the God Almighty Playwright himself. Shifting the characters hither and thither. Slinking away to let them do their worst, yet still spying on them. In charge, yet not in charge. Enraged when some of the characters (Lucio in particular) subvert his plottings and make nonsense of his delusions of omnipotence. Hah! What a strange play.

And a production of two halves.