"Decent production of difficult tragedy" may be about as arresting a headline as "Small earthquake in Chile". But the fact remains that Michael Attenborough's Antony and Cleopatra, on its transfer from Stratford to the Haymarket, remains what it always was: a good example of robust, middle-rank Shakespeare that suggests the RSC is neither in a state of artistic meltdown nor at a creative peak.
The chief beneficiary of the move to a smaller theatre is Stuart Wilson's Antony. His voice may lack resonance, and his braided locks and salt-and-pepper beard may give him the look of Willie Nelson resigning himself to a long tour on the road. But Wilson captures the key point about Antony: the gulf between the heroic legend and the present reality. This is a man who is the victim of his own myth, which gives particular pathos to his complaint that Caesar is "harping on what I am, not what he knew I was". Wilson's virtue is that he both implies the past grandeur and the irretrievable decline of an old soldier who bungles even his own suicide.
Sinead Cusack also brings the right qualities to Cleopatra: quicksilver energy, boundless curiosity and emotional volatility. But she is at her best in her final, voluptuous embrace of death. When her attendant, Iras, says she would rather scratch out her eyes than be taken as a captive to Rome, Cusack blazes approval, crying: "Why, that's the way to fool their preparation." It is also a measure of Cusack's mix of regal dignity and democratic sensuality that she enjoys an unusually tactile relationship with her female followers, most notably Noma Dumezweni's alertly adoring Charmian.
My chief complaint is at Attenborough's cuts, which give the impression that he is trying to impose order on this unruly jungle of a play. By eliminating Pompey and the putative assassination of the world leaders aboard his galley, Attenborough sacrifices a vital political cynicism. By chopping Cleopatra's treasurer Seleucus, he loses the queen's element of contradictory calculation. And the recurring appearances of Trevor Martin's Soothsayer, a basso profundo in black drag, misleadingly imply that this is a tragedy of fate rather than of character.
But this remains a good, straight-driving production. It never lets us forget that this is a play as much about self-deception as impenitent passion: when Stephen Campbell-Moore's excellent Octavius hymns the dead Antony, whom he loathed in life, as "my mate in empire", you realise that he is as much a prey to delusional dreams as the lovers themselves.
· Until September 21. Box office: 0870 901 3356.
