Who’s your favourite Catwoman in Batman? Michelle Pfeiffer makes a strong showing in the 1990s movies; Julie Newmar in the ’60s TV show has her devotees; but, also in that show, there’s Eartha Kitt. More to the point, what the devil has any of this to do with Antony And Cleopatra? Well, there’s a big statue of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast onstage in the latest RSC revival, which is enough to set you (well, to set me) thinking that maybe it isn’t coincidence that Josette Simon’s Cleopatra so often sounds like la Kitt.

Simon, making her first appearance for the RSC since the turn of the century(!), is an excellent actress, but she cripples herself here by putting on that voice. There’s the huskiness, the sing-song intonation, the slightly, randomly tweaked vowels and, for no apparent reason, Sean Conneryesque S’s: in one of her early lines she declares, “I am shick and shullen.” It seems to be a way of making Cleopatra exotic – certainly more exotic than any other Egyptian character onstage, all of whom speak in perfectly ordinary accents. Maybe it’s also a way of getting Simon out of her usual more restrained territory to play the legendarily mercurial queen of the Nile. However, there’s no easy way to say this: it ruins her performance. Even her most earnest lines carry that inescapable clang of daftness. Very, very bad move.

Otherwise, Iqbal Khan’s production is a decent bit of work; for my money, it’s stronger and goes deeper than the revival of Julius Caesar which opened on the same day as part of the RSC’s 2017 Roman season, and with which it shares many of the same actors (though not in the same roles: unlike his Wars of the Roses histories, Shakespeare’s Roman plays don’t work that way). Antony Byrne is softer-tempered than the grizzled bruiser as which the ageing Mark Antony is usually portrayed, but he loses none of his power for that. As his lieutenant Enobarbus, Andrew Woodall gives a thoughtful common-man reading which complements his brusque Julius Caesar in the other play.

Khan doesn’t delve into the Roman political intrigues, but nor does he simplify or skim over them; he efficiently, clearly shows that, at that moment as power shook down from a triumvirate to a single man who would later become the first Emperor of Rome, the struggle was both the young Octavius Caesar’s (played by Ben Allen) to win and Antony’s to lose. But we need to see a reason for Antony to lose it all, a human reason. That reason does wear the crown of Egypt, but I don’t think it purrs like a certain self-conscious jazz chantoozie.

Written for The Lady.