With the Antony and then the Prospero he performed at Stratford last year, Patrick Stewart proved to any residual doubter that he was much more than a bald bloke traversing the universe in space-age couture. Now here he is, transposed to the West End, piling proof on proof that Star Trek is behind him and some of the great classical roles are within his grasp.

His Antony is as good as any you’ll see: a lion whose claim to be king of the jungle is still strong but dwindling daily as he succumbs to age and sexual temptation.

But then Antony isn’t as challenging a role as Cleopatra, who is burdened with the task of embodying “infinite variety”. She must be wily, erotic, arrogant, manipulative, loving and far, far more. So who can blame that fine actress, Harriet Walter, for failing to embrace all her contradictions?

Walter is the Cleopatra who, as Enobarbus says, can hop 40 paces through the public street, but she isn’t the musky serpent of old Nile. She twists and turns and plays mischievous games with Antony even when he’s at death’s door and she’s in death’s anteroom. She’s genuinely in love with the man and genuinely in grief at his suicide. But she lacks the emotional ferocity, the danger and, above all, the sensuality that Frances Barber brought to the role in a less adroit revival at Shakespeare’s Globe last summer.

Yes, Gregory Doran’s RSC production remains clear, direct, pacey. That’s due partly to a stage which, except for a scarred brick-and-plaster back-wall, remains bare and open for anything from boardroom discussions to big battles. It’s also thanks to a consistency of performance that we haven’t always associated with the RSC in recent years.

Watch the reaction of Octavius Caesar when Antony calls him “boy”. He’s enraged because that’s what he becomes beside Stewart — a confident, laid-back father figure who simultaneously provokes his admiration and resentment, envy and disgust. Altogether, he’s as far from the usual chilling automaton as he could get. Rather, John Hopkins’s Octavius is raw, edgy, insecure, neurotic — his love for his sister Octavia verges on the incestuous — and yet he has the strength to evolve into Rome’s first great emperor.

There’s plenty of thoughful detail in this revival. How much better, for instance, to deliver Enobarbus’s famous speech about Cleopatra and her burnished throne not as a set piece but as a fiercely articulate reproach to those of Caesar’s aides who believe that Antony can renounce her.

That’s what Ken Bones achieves, in the process filling out Shakespeare’s portrait of Antony and Cleopatra.

As Stewart plays Antony, he’s a besotted oldster precariously and, in the end, desperately clinging on to his glittering youth. He’s also tough, forceful, humorous, large-hearted and effortlessly in command of everybody except, sadly, Cleopatra and himself. “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity,” says Agrippa as he watches Octavius gulp, totter, swoon at the news of Antony’s death. Too true.

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