Macbeth

At a time when the political tussles over who should steer Scotland make Macbeth ripe for contemporary contextualising, it seems something of a waste to set this three-handed version in an English young offenders’ institution. 

It starts strongly and you can see the ‘who’s the daddy’ battle lines drawn between Macbeth and Macduff as though Ray Winstone himself were in the room with a billiard ball in a sock, but then it loses both its way and its impact as the young actors struggle to delineate enough of the ancillary characters.

Some scenes do work: the witches’ warning to Macbeth that he must slay Macduff’s family, and the "damned spot" handwashing are clear enough, but once Birnam Wood catches fire the whole enterprise has collapsed into indistinction. Occasionally we lurch into a gay disco with magenta lighting, where Josh Beecham’s realistically driven Macbeth snorts coke before a soliloquy; but the production’s clutching at straws as well as unseen daggers when this isn’t fully stitched into the rest of the narrative.

Although the setting is modernised, the text remains resolutely 1611 and the cast cling closely to the phrasing of the blank verse, punctuating it with frequent stabbing palm gestures. Some of the misplacements of emphasis are just plain wrong.