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At the Donmar Warehouse, Max Webster’s thrilling staging of Macbeth hurtles forward with the urgency of a psychodrama, propelled by an ever-present soundscape. Webster and his sound designer, Gareth Fry, make brilliant use of binaural technology to closet us with the action. Audience members wear headphones through which the sound is relayed, catching every soft murmur, clink of metal or muttered aside and plunging us into Macbeth’s internal turmoil.
It’s as if we are eavesdropping on his mind — and what a tormented mind it is. A superb David Tennant first appears already soaked in blood, obsessively washing his hands, while the early scenes play out in his thoughts — and in our headphones — as snippets of the battle he’s just experienced. His Macbeth is clearly unhinged by war, his mind racing and darting: fertile ground for the prophecies of the unseen weird sisters, which here reach as whispered thoughts lingering on the air, voices not just in his head, but our own.
Tennant is tremendous, his body tense and coiled as steel wire, his eyes sharp and hard: this is a man who has clearly already supped with horrors, who feels he is owed something, whose rapier mind is quick to jump from possibility to action. He handles Macbeth’s soliloquies with ease, hauling us with him on his hellish descent into nihilism.
He is superbly partnered by Cush Jumbo as a clenched, contained Lady Macbeth, whose own slide into madness is quiet and devastating. Both are haunted — by battle, by death and, above all, by the loss of a child, whose laughter sometimes runs through the soundscape. One little boy (Casper Knopf on press night) plays both Fleance and Macduff’s son, but also occasionally appears behind the glass screen at the back of the stage, a wan, silent presence.
There’s great work too from Cal MacAninch’s watchful Banquo, Noof Ousellam’s gruff, upright Macduff, and from Jatinder Singh Randhawa as the Porter. Throughout, the ensemble, dressed in steely grey tops and black kilts, keep up the momentum, shifting restlessly around Rosanna Vize’s monochrome set or huddling behind the glass, a reproachful chorus of the dead.
The place is Scotland, as suggested by the kilts, accents and use of plaintive live fiddle and pipe music; the period, though, is indeterminate and the resonance universal. This is a production that draws us close to the yawning torment of guilt and the cavernous loss of war, while the rich aural concept emphasises the eerie brilliance of Shakespeare’s dark, image-laden text.
★★★★★
To February 10, donmarwarehouse.com
