Macbeth

Published Thursday 8 May 2008 at 13:40 by Victor Hallett

When the audience emerges, breathless and shaken, from Terry Hands’ fast, relentless and visceral production, the theatre’s bar and foyer spaces seem to belong to an alien world. So immersed have we been in the dark and murky Scotland portrayed on stage, played without interval (impossible to imagine where one could have been placed), that the bright lights and drinks seem oddly unreal.

This is a production conjured out of darkness. The dramatic lighting, designed by Hands himself, only serves to emphasise the blackness. Through this nightmare world, Owen Teale’s ferociously powerful Macbeth stalks, changing from warrior to murderer, touching on madness and ending up a near automaton. His soliloquies, spoken intimately to the audience yet with such an intense air of privacy that they exclude any sense of sharing, are particularly effective.

He’s perfectly matched by Vivien Parry’s intense, neurotic and very Welsh Lady Macbeth. There’s no pity here but there’s real vulnerability during her superb sleepwalking scene.

Jenny Livsey, Victoria Pugh and Catrin Aaron as the witches are extraordinarily unnerving. Oliver Ryan is a wonderfully shifty Malcolm. Joshua Richards is a fine, upstanding Banquo, with Simon Armstrong an equally dignified and honest Ross. The porter scene is actually funny.

There are jolting shocks, surprises, stunning bleak visuals, pounding fighting, pacing to take the breath away and Colin Towns’ score provokes an almost constant unease.

It’s a Macbeth that thrills as it draws us deep into its heart of darkness and holds us in its ferociously claustrophobic grip.