I may be overgeneralising; there are other factors that might have made the difference. For one thing, which for some reason it didn't occur to me until after I posted, the two plays I saw had different directors, so it might have been down to that. The comedy I saw was directed by the Pop Up Globe's founder and most frequent director, while the director of the tragedy has years of experience as a director of Shakespeare but not, perhaps, so much experience of directing Shakespeare in this kind of space.