“It’s a bold move to reactivate Stratford’s The Other Place as a regular performance space with ‘Macbeth’,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. “This, after all, was the scene of Trevor Nunn’s landmark 1976 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.”
Daniel Raggett’s new modern-day staging – set in a boozer in gangland Glasgow – is not in that league, but it “seizes every opportunity to achieve a sense of infernal intimacy”, often plunging the auditorium into darkness, and creating the atmosphere of “a nightmare lock-in”. The witches are a disturbingly ordinary trio of pub gossips. Duncan is a brutal “old capo” who has had the Thane of Cawdor executed; while Macbeth and his peers are thugs fighting to take over his turf. It’s a brutal production, blessed by a fine central performance by Sam Heughan, making his RSC debut.
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