The Stage

Macbeth

Published Thursday 18 September 2008 at 12:00 by Thom Dibdin

Liam Brennan’s lucidly spoken and cleverly judged Macbeth and Jenny Kagan’s extremely well designed and delivered lighting scheme provide strong foundations for director Lucy Pitman-Wallace. Through them, in a production which is set firmly in medieval Scotland, she finds an inner turmoil and intensity about Macbeth’s tragic tussle with ambitious treachery and descent into madness.

Elsewhere are chinks of illumination. Allison McKenzie’s depiction of Lady Macbeth’s own final moments of madness are excellent, Jimmy Chisholm both creates a strong basis for the treachery theme as Duncan and provides the necessary comic relief as the Porter, and Martin Ledwith’s bug-eyed ghost of Banquo contributes mightily to Brennan’s madness at the feast.

That is about it, however. Most else lies somewhere between the downright risible and the misguided, with the witches succeeding in being both. Their writhing is enough to inspire a walkout in the opening scene, while their dancing around the sword-wielding Macbeth and Macduff at the last, while fitting with the spectral influence they have had throughout, demands that the actors can carry off the swordplay.

Delivery of the lines is unclear rather than illuminating - to the point where, in some scenes, the only comprehensible voice is Macbeth’s.

Lucy Osborne’s three-tiered single set works well within the lighting scheme - not so her costumes, which, although practical, seem to be relics from a sartorially challenged time. Philip Pinsky’s sound design swings between the obtrusive and the overly muffled.

Pitman-Wallace’s ideas are definitely sound. Her delivery of them in this wildly uneven production is not.