Theatre review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe)

The Globe's latest Macbeth comes courtesy of director Abigail Graham, who casts Max Bennett as the Scottish nobleman whose prowess on the battlefield earns him extra honours. But thanks to a prophecy from three witches, he expects even more: They promised him the throne, and spurred on by his wife he decides not to wait and see if fate will make the prophecy true, but instead murders the King and takes his place straight away. Compared to most recent Globe productions Graham's doesn't play around with gender with quite as much gleeful abandon, but we still get a Queen instead of a King - Tamzin Griffin's Queen Duncan comes across as a capable but uninspiring leader, who brushes over the fact that she's said Macbeth and Banquo (Fode Simbo) were equally important to the military victory, but only actually rewarded the former.

On the other hand the ambiguous, but usually cast as female, witches are all men - Calum Callaghan, Ben Caplan and Ferdy Roberts are a boiler-suited team of orderlies who frequently lurk around the stage pushing body bags on hospital gurneys.

In fact the witches are the dominant element of the production - they also multi-role as the Porter, Doctor and Seyton respectively, as well as the three murderers, and the actors certainly leave the door open to the idea that these might not be other characters at all, but the supernatural trio taking a more hands-on approach to the events they've set in motion. They're also at the centre of many of the evening's most memorable moments: Callaghan takes to the traditional job of trolling the groundlings with just about as much relish as I've seen from anyone, while I liked the way Roberts' Seyton ingratiated himself with the Macbeths by helping cover up the regicide: He's one of those Shakespearean characters who sort of shows up halfway through, so it's interesting to see him step up and essentially volunteer for the role of chief henchman he occupies for the rest of the play.

Meanwhile the spellcasting "double, double toil and trouble" scene provides the gore the venue so often has a lot of fun with; after a blender got used in the Swanamaker's unusually bloodless Titus Andronicus earlier this year, it gets to come outdoors and mix together all kinds of unpleasantness here. And there's a particularly eerily way of presenting the visions of Banquo's heirs becoming kings later in this scene, as the witches zip Macbeth himself into one of the body bags to hallucinate this final prophecy.

This is a very fast-paced and dynamic Macbeth, and one that manages to mine the play for humour without it tipping over too much into unintended comedy as well, as the play can be very prone to. But these elements come with major trade-offs in terms of character development and atmosphere. Despite Osnat Schmool's music consisting almost entirely of ominous drumming and eerie choral singing, there's little real sense of supernatural dread, especially in the first half. I know an open-air theatre on a hot sunny day can be counterproductive at bringing to life a spooky Scottish castle, but this is at least my fifth Macbeth on this stage and I'm pretty sure it's the first to take quite so long to build atmosphere.

Meanwhile, while I'm all for short and fast-paced Shakespeare, the bombastic and urgent line delivery doesn't leave much room for nuance. Matti Houghton's Lady Macbeth is so ruthlessly pragmatic and businesslike she seems to be on and off the stage faster than you can blink, getting things done but not necessarily telling us who this woman is. And Bennett gives us Macbeth as bureaucrat: He deals with the prophecy as if he's been given a job to do, and killing the Queen is the most efficient means of getting there, so he does so with the most cursory soul-searching about what this means. Once it's done the reality of it hits him, and he becomes a version of the character whose madness is genuine, immediate, all-consuming, and makes his shirt fall off for the latter part of the evening.

I do like a production of the play that beefs up the role of Macbeth's nemesis, who as written is another character who suddenly gets plucked out of a sea of assorted thanes near the end and arbitrarily turned into the hero. Here we get to meet Aaron Anthony's Macduff right from the start, as the bloody man in the opening scene; and Eleanor Wyld's heavily-pregnant Lady Macduff is present at Dunsinane long before the single scene Shakespeare gives her. Although it's ironic that Macduff's scene in England with Malcolm (Joseph Payne) is just about the only point where the production slows down - the confusing first half of that scene is surely most people's choice of which bit they'd rather get through as quickly as possible.

This probably isn't helped by the black military gear the characters are wearing - Ti Green's designs follow the overall trend in giving the most interesting ideas to the witches, and there's a lot of fairly drab monochrome elsewhere in the show. But generally this is a production that improves as it goes on; I've seen much stronger character arcs developed in this play, but there's certainly a few moments that are likely to stick in the memory.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 28th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.