What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian Museum in Sydney on Saturday and there are other extravaganzas from the land of the pyramids elsewhere: Discovering Ancient Egypt is on show at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra from 15 December and Pharoah will hit the National Gallery of Victory from 14 June. Robert Hughes used to refer to these spectaculars as the Gold of the Gorgonzolas but there is something about Egyptian civilisation which is uncanny in its majesty. It’s not just the thrill of discovering the Egyptians as a child in Leonard Cotrell’s books or seeing Yul Brynner play another Ramses in The Ten Commandments when Moses said to him, ‘Let my people go.’ It’s tied up with the way the pyramids, glimpsed in dawn light, are like a vision of the Most High.

Nothing could be more different than the weird and rather jarring four-part doco about Robbie Williams on Netflix. If the pyramids and the tombs and treasures of Ancient Egypt seem effortlessly exotic and wise the boy from Take That kicking fifty recapitulates so much of his early career as a nightmare of panic attacks and dread and massive drug abuse only to present his recent life with his wife and children as a contrasting barely credible paradise. It’s hard to imagine either the downers or today’s euphoria had quite the monolithic quality they’re given here though everything is complicated by the fact that we’re watching Robbie Williams lolling about in his jocks as he watches on a laptop the splendours and miseries of yesteryear. It’s a weird approach to documentary – not least because it tends to exclude other people – but you see how the Ridley Scott people who produced it became fascinated by Robbie’s intensity and self-consciousness.

It going to be fascinating to see what Joaquin Phoenix makes of the role of Napoleon in the new movie of that name by Ridley Scott. It was Goethe who said Napoleon was as great as a man could be without virtue and he has been brought to the screen before in Napoléon the 1927 Abel Gance classic, by Brando in Desirée and by Rod Steiger in Waterloo. Napoleon’s greatness was so palpable that Tolstoy took it upon himself to cut him down to size in War and Peace with the same kind of competitive zeal that he brought to King Lear and the upshot is bizarre and unconvincing, a bit like one of Christopher Hitchens’ demolition jobs on an epic scale. One of the incidental charms of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is that the Empress Josephine is played by Vanessa Kirby who essayed Princess Margaret with such seductive sparkle that she had all sorts of young blokes who were by no means royal-watchers in a state of high attention.

The first four episodes of the last batch of The Crown, the ones about the last days of Diana, were released on 16 November and Australia’s Elizabeth Debicki gives a dazzling performance as the woman who brought the monarchy to its knees. She might occasionally look like Paris Hilton but she is a superb Diana, full of eye-batting nonchalance and weird twists of emotional intelligence.

Of course the concluding movement of The Crown has to compete with Stephen Frears’ The Queen which is a minor masterpiece and also has the advantage of Helen Mirren. But that’s post-Diana; it’s a requiem for Diana and the producers were wise to separate off the two sections. Debicki is immeasurably better than anyone else who has played the mature Diana. She even pulls off a weird but tender ghost scene with Dominic West’s Prince Charles. The concluding episodes start on 16 December.

It was the centenary last week of that very great Irish poet Yeats winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is an irony in the fact that the award came a year or two after The Wild Swans at Coole (‘The trees are in their autumn beauty, / The woodland paths are dry’) and a few years before The Tower and its successors which represent the very greatest Yeats (‘That is no country for old men. The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees’) but it is wholly appropriate that we celebrate Yeats who was the most resonant and variegated poet of the twentieth century even though his career stretched back to the 1890s.

They will remember Edward Albee as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and it’s impressive to see that Kat Stewart is playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Red Stitch directed by Sarah Goodes and with her husband David Whiteley as George. Of course Martha looms so large in every actress’s wish list because of Elizabeth Taylor’s staggering performance with Richard Burton in Mike Nichols’ film. In fact Edward Albee had thought about Bette Davis and James Mason as the fated duo. Before the film Uta Hagen had eaten up the stage as Martha and Bunney Brook had played it with great success here in Melbourne. In recent years Kathleen Turner was apparently a terrific Martha.

There is the difficulty with a film of a play as superbly realised as the Taylor-Burton-Nichols’ Virgina Woolf that it completely overtakes our sense of the author. Albee’s The Zoo Story is one of the greater one-act plays in the language, Tiny Alice (which Gielgud did on Broadway) is almost a symbolistic play and then there is A Delicate Balance which was done magnificently with Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield directed by Tony Richardson which in its modulated much quieter way is a fine play. So is Three Tall Women done by Maggie Smith and later Glenda Jackson and so in a minor way is The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? in which Wendy Hughes was superb in Kate Cherry’s MTC production along with Philip Quast.

So what would we nominate as the greatest play of the twentieth century? Waiting for Godot? Long Day’s Journey into Night? Andrew Upton has translated a Russian play for Sigrid Thornton. Well, in fact The Seagull is from 1898. But I know a wicked man who when he asked this question and gets the Becketts and the O’Neills says, ‘Wrong. The Cherry Orchard – 1904.’