Donmar Warehouse – until 10 February 2024
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
5*****
David Tennant is magnificently murderous in Max Webster’s chillingly intimate production. With the audience wearing binaural headphones, Gareth Fry’s sound design enhances the haunting of Macbeth by the three unseen witches, with voices, moans and giggles swirling around your head making the question of whether these are Macbeth’s external or internal demons. The soundscape conjured up piles on the imagery of Shakespeare’s text to build a fevered atmosphere of foreboding, making the scenes of the Macbeth’s plotting terrifyingly quiet and focussed – the sense that you are eavesdropping on terrible secrets pervades. The headphones do seem a little unnecessary at first, but after a few minutes of people quietly lifting them to see what the play sounds like without headphones nobody really touched them and the audience were fully immersed and swept away. The headphones are ammunition for Jatinder Singh Randhawa’s porter to insult the audience with, and his routine as he moves around the audience before opening the castle door is, for once, genuinely funny before returning us to the horror of the night.
The sound design brings a wonderful intimacy to the performance as the famous lines don’t have to be projected, so the Macbeths whisper in each other’s ears and Tennant revels in the duality of whispered murderous asides amid jovial loud hospitality. Rosanna Vize’s monochrome bare stage allows the play to zip along in just under 2 hours with any necessary location changes shown through Bruno Poet’s immaculate lighting and the use of the glass panelled area behind the stage. Here the cast and musicians sometimes sit silently, with their sudden banging on the glass or pressing against it adding to the tension. The ensemble choreography during Macbeth’s second meeting with the witches is wonderfully eerie – fluid and disconcerting.
David Tennant is malicious and vicious as Macbeth in a brilliant performance capturing the spite and turmoil with both manic flourishes and quiet, pitiful soul-searching. His Macbeth never becomes the weak man who needs chiding by his ambitious wife, instead Cush Jumbo’s marvellously nuanced Lady M (the lone English voice amongst the Scots) is his support, knowing exactly what to say to spur him on and showing signs of mental turmoil from the beginning. The lost child of the Macbeths is hugely symbolic in this production, with the young actor playing Fleance taking on the roles of all the children, and a final, almost nonchalant killing by Macbeth shockingly symbolises his moral fall.
Max Webster’s production will probably split opinion but with such layered and intimate performances from a stellar cast, the clever use of sound enhances a visually stark but stunning play that will haunt you.