Macbeth: a ‘genuinely scary’ production

“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.

Heughan “achieves full tragic weight, especially in the soliloquies”, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “Tomorrow and tomorrow” is brilliantly – and shockingly – staged as a kind of grisly slow dance with a dead character. As Lady Macbeth, Lia Williams is a revelation. She makes the verse “vernacular”, and some lines as “modern as the Pinter” at which she has previously excelled. The text adapts “enjoyably well to a drinking den” setting, and the production is “genuinely scary”.

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It’s certainly not for the fainthearted, said Michael Davies on WhatsOnStage: some moments are over the top nasty. As for the concept, it works well in some respects. The rivalries and shifting powers between thanes transfer effectively to gangland Glasgow; but it also has fatal flaws. Shakespeare’s Duncan is a “most sainted king”, yet here he is a hardman with no “virtues” to be mourned. Macbeth is a valiant warrior undone by his inadequacies – but in this telling he leads Macduff’s son off stage carrying a hammer, to “dispatch the lethal blow himself”. Thus a “mighty tragedy” is reduced to a “seedy bar brawl for control over a bunch of thugs for whom it is impossible to feel any empathy”.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 6 December