Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses history plays form a palpable sequence, hence the Royal Shakespeare Company has in the past staged them under the same direction and with the same actors in the same roles from play to play. This unity is not true of his four Roman plays, therefore the current RSC Roman season is to consist of four discrete productions. Even these first two openings, which superficially appear to be linked, portray events separated by a number of years, thus rendering them doubling-unfriendly. If there is one thing the pair of revivals have in common it is a tendency towards demonstrative performance, although this is a general note in Angus Jackson’s Julius Caesar and more particularly focused in Iqbal Khan’s Antony And Cleopatra.

Jackson goes for clarity, often at the expense of depth. Soliloquies are delivered straight out to the audience, moments of high emotion played to the hilt: Caesar’s wife Calphurnia shrieks on her knees that he should not go to the Senate on the Ides of March, and after the assassination a spat between Brutus and Cassius escalates until Brutus stops just short of stabbing his sworn brother. Alex Waldmann thoroughly deserves his most prominent RSC role to date as Brutus, but he’s capable of a more nuanced portrayal than this. Similarly, Mark Antony is usually portrayed as a jock henchman of Caesar’s who grows into statesmanship, most clearly in the course of the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech; here, however, James Corrigan’s Antony is consistently a cannier political operator than anyone else on the Capitol, and plays the crowd at Caesar’s funeral with innate mastery and the help of a fake will. (As Agrippa in Antony And Cleopatra, Corrigan describes Antony at Caesar’s death as behaving in emotional ways that he knows damn well he didn’t.)

Andrew Woodall, the only actor to play sizeable roles in each show, is a brusque, unyielding Caesar but a more rounded, estuarially accented Enobarbus, lieutenant to the older Antony in Egypt. As this Antony, Antony Byrne begins almost serenely, light on both martial thunder and epicurean hi-jinks at the Egyptian court. Khan is efficient at showing Octavius Caesar edging out the other two members of the ruling triumvirate and Antony’s loss of his old touch in preventing the younger man’s power grab. Where it falls down is in offering a plausibly seductive reason for Antony’s senses so to have been dulled.

Josette Simon is, as a rule, particularly skilled at delivering measured responses, but for the notoriously flighty Cleopatra she has tried too hard to perform in a manner alien to her. Her Cleopatra would be magnificent (notwithstanding a fondness for left-hand gesturing) if she were a mute. However, she (or possibly Khan) has elected that her Cleopatra will speak in a faux-exotic accent (why? No other Egyptian character does). Unspecifically mutated vowels, Sean Connery sibilants and a sing-song (or rather shing-shong) cadencing cripple the impact of even her most earnest lines. An added husky tone gives her a frequent air of Eartha Kitt, as if Catwoman were being invoked to revere the onstage statue of the cat-goddess Bast. On the occasion of Simon’s first RSC appearance this century, she is heartbreaking in all the wrong ways.

Written for the Financial Times.