It is impossible to predict how Josette Simon’s Cleopatra in the RSC’s Antony and Cleopatra will react to anything. She lives up to Enobarbus’s report of her “infinite variety”. Simon’s feline grace – this is an extraordinarily physical performance – is a match for the Egyptian cat that is part of Robert Innes Hopkins’s design. She does not seem like “old” Nile at all. And when she imitates Caesar, she puts on an affected baby voice. The fascinating sense Simon gives is of underlying insecurity, as though Cleopatra were shuffling selves. She is a queen and a jester, a fake swooner whose final tragic trick will kill Antony.
Antony Byrne’s Antony is an ordinary, erring, henpecked bloke, but when he leaves Cleopatra, promising to be a “man of steel”, he sounds, movingly, like a man of flesh, and I have seldom witnessed a more horribly realistic death on stage.
Iqbal Khan’s production is as upstanding as Hopkins’s Roman columns. What it lacks in adventure it makes up for in clarity. Special mention must be made of Ben Allen’s Caesar. Intelligent, sensitive and personable (happily in possession of a Roman profile), his nuanced delivery is exceptional. But Andrew Woodall, a fine actor, is miscast as Enobarbus. He plays him as a rough cockney who, when describing the burnished barge – among the most lyrical speeches Shakespeare wrote – sounds like a secondhand car dealer settling on a price.
But this production would make a fine introduction to the play, and it ends spectacularly. If Antony’s death was bloody, Cleopatra’s is beautiful as she strips to nothing and is then dressed in royal trappings. This is death as coronation – as crowning glory.
• At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 9 September
