Macbeth review – a dynamic tragedy of somersaulting ambition
Here is a Macbeth for young audiences that is full of hurly-burly. Lucy Cuthbertson has trimmed one of Shakespeare's shortest plays to the length of a football match and directs a cast who rarely seem to stop moving. The witches turn cartwheels, Sam Lyon-Behan's fight direction is influenced by action movies and Banquo's ghost does acrobatics, even interlinking arms with Macbeth during a roisterous ceilidh.
Played without an interval, this version makes few wholesale cuts but gives each scene a nip and a tuck. There's no Donalbain, the Porter takes the Old Man's lines and Shakespeare's use of repetition, including his web of interlinked imagery, is reduced. That weakens the tragedy's usual incantatory effect and, while the production is staged with elan, it lacks any ethereal, bloodcurdling weirdness.
Take those circus witches: in casual modern dress, they contort their bodies and perform tricks – at one point interlinking to form a many-limbed monster – but these are feats to make you marvel rather than tremble. Their simultaneous turning of heads and pointing of fingers just evoke pop choreography. The production's pell-mell pace also means some speeches are rushed, notably in the aftermath of Duncan's murder, so do not have time to get under your skin.
The momentum is aided by superb musical direction from Zands Duggan, joined on percussion by Rosie Bergonzi, with Max Gittings on bagpipes. Occasionally cranking an army siren, the musicians wear camo, as do most of the cast in the opening scenes of a production set on 'a military base, somewhere in the world' that emphasises the sense of an alternative family unit. Boiling point tensions are established with a new intro in which a bungled operation results in the fatalities of innocents.
Natalie Pryce's design is as medically modern as it was for Cuthbertson's excellent Romeo and Juliet last year. Lady Macbeth (Hanora Kamen) laboriously prepares well in advance of the murder's mess by dressing in PPE and she fusses obsessively with a UV torch in search of stains when driven mad. The inverse of her journey from calculated to muddled is equally well handled by Patrick Osborne's Macbeth.
The story's children are unflinchingly placed at the heart of this violence: Rhiannon Skerritt's Fleance runs around with Daddy's rifle (an affectionate bond is swiftly established with Robert Penny's Banquo) and the Macduffs (Roxy Faridany and Roann Hassani McCloskey, playing a female couple) carry their kids in BabyBjörns, even during fight scenes. The cauldron is filled not with newts and frogs but firearms and the sisters prove bulletproof when Macbeth takes aim at them. Cuthbertson brings them back at the end, implying a cycle of violence – or perhaps more of a somersault.
Principally playing Duncan, Jo Servi is also a porter to remember in a new scene written by Faith Obum-Uchendu, the winner of a student competition run by the Globe. With a series of knock, knock jokes, he questions the teenage audience's hypocrisies about greenwashing and fast fashion, singling out a teacher's pet for using an online essay generator. Malcolm (Simeon Desvignes), too, is charismatic among this dynamic cast.
With its intelligent tweaks to exposition and clear delivery, the storytelling is always fluid but overall it's an efficient production rather than a revelatory one.
At Shakespeare's Globe, London, until 20 April
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