Max Bennett’s Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Thameside replica reaches for the crown just ahead of Reuben Joseph for the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon this month and David Tennant in London, in December. Why might there be sudden interest in Shakespeare’s study of someone who ruthlessly pursues power and then proves unsuited to it? To even up casting opportunity, most classical stagings now ignore the old code of M (male) and F (female) roles. The approach here, though, is less gender-neutral than gender-pointed. Director Abigail Graham makes the witches not weird sisters but a trio of sinister brothers wearing full hazmat suits and birds-of-prey masks.
Atmospherically, Macbeth is Shakespeare’s darkest play – there is comment on the sun’s reluctance to rise – but at the open-air Globe, even in a dull summer, this short play is almost wholly day-lit. Darkness must descend in other ways. Aaron Anthony finds the full shock and horror in the tricky lines where Macduff learns his family’s fate, and fight director Bret Yount contrives unnervingly convincing murders.
Throughout, the witch equivalents trundle mortuary gurneys slowly around the stage, carrying body-bagged corpses as they pile up, or left tantalisingly empty for the next one. In the Act 4 “boil and bubble” scene, their “cauldron” is an autopsy laboratory where gruesome smoothies are mixed from human offal. This switch avoids misogyny in depicting witches but, in a parallel transition, Macbeth’s first victim, Duncan, is not king but queen, played with brittle skittishness by Tamzin Griffin. There were murmurings around me about Liz Truss and Nicola Sturgeon, but the key seems unlikely to be that precise. The change makes the slain monarch Malcolm’s mother, underlining this version’s striking focus on parental dreams and grief. In a prologue, Lady Macbeth holds the child to whom she recalls having “given suck” but who, presumably dead, we never see again.
Matti Houghton seems clearly still in the denial, anger and depression stages of grief, and Macbeth later breaks down at references to a “new born babe” and “the baby of a girl”. It seems implied that the pair resent Duncan and Lady Macduff (a powerful Eleanor Wyld) having secured their successions.
In a reading that may chime with both locals and tourists, Bennett’s often manic and jokey Macbeth is clearly unfit for office from the off. He tears off his coronation robes and crown (visibly resembling Charles III’s) as if they scorch his skin.
Dramaturg Zoë Svendsen intelligently trims the text – cutting scenes featuring the spirit Hecate, probably added by Thomas Middleton – and glossing the most oblique lost meanings: in a Macbeth riff on dog breeds, “shoughs” becomes “cockapoos” and “demi-wolves” are cross-bred to “rottweilers.” The comic interlude of the Porter – which the RSC hired Stewart Lee to rewrite – is here played by Calum Callaghan for genuine laughs, the text intact except for a couple of humorous substitutions: “farmers” becomes “bankers” and “equivocators”, originally a post-reformation jibe at Catholics, is changed, more ecumenically, for “fake-news spreader”.
Joseph Payne’s sweet but naive Malcolm seems no more suited to power than Duncan or Macbeth and it seems clear that Scotland will soon require another leader, who may in turn disappoint – one of the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition feels darkly aligned to our times.
• Macbeth is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 28 October
