Macbeth

One of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, Macbeth is comparatively short and easy to follow but its simplicity bellies it’s psychological brilliance. Far from relying on the star casting of David Tennant and Cush Jumbo to drive the show, Max Webster’s concept for the production requires each member of the audience to put on headphones for the duration.

Headphones in place, the lights go down and our heads are filled with the eery sounds of wind and bird calls until a pool of light reveals Tennant on the monochrome set, transformed into a lean warrior in kilt and vest, crouching over a silver basin. He appears to have just left the battlefield, scrubbing violently at his arms, shoulder deep in blood.

Ignited by a prophecy from the witches on the heath, Macbeth tells the story of one couple’s ambition for the Crown, quickly followed by their descent into madness, guilt and further bloodshed; ‘they say blood will have blood.’ Written four years after the end of the brutal Irish wars that led to the fall of the old Gaelic order, contemporary accounts describe veterans suffering from what we now call post-traumatic-stress disorder. And this PTSD ‘madness’ is in many ways the focus of Webster’s production.

Tennant is entirely convincing as a man experiencing the unbearable haunting of flashbacks and visions that return post trauma and take hold of a person’s mind even when they should be safe again; ‘full of scorpions is my mind’ says Macbeth. Similarly, Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth has a psychological realism and a softness despite her cruelty. Macbeth desperately asks the physician for a cure as her night terrors drive her again and again to wash the imagined blood from her hands before she eventually takes her own life. Noof Ousellam (Macduff) by contrast gives a spell-binding performance of a man who is devastated by grief but retains his grip on reality.

Putting the audience in headphones is a confident and intriguing concept which paradoxically draws you in to the intimate sounds of breath and snapping bones whilst defending you against the reality of being fully present in the room with the actors and the audience. The sound of the production is in control with the visual design clean and focussed as if to clear the way. Scottish accents throughout the cast bring their own music and the stunning Gaelic singer, Kathleen MacInnes and composer Alasdair Macrae have woven together a soundscape played live on stage (behind a glass screen) that harks back to the oral traditions of the real Macbeth. Most strikingly, the sounds of the witches themselves are spoken by the cast but never visually realised as if they only ever appeared in Macbeth’s mind.

The Scottish play in headphones hovers somewhere between the experience of stage, cinema and radio play – yet Webster’s vision is so fully realised across all its elements that it feels entirely coherent. Whether you like the experience or not, the greatest winner of all is Shakespeare’s language; every syllable chiming inside your mind with delicious precision.