Macbeth – Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Lucy Cuthbertson

Reorientating Shakespeare for young audiences, the Playing Shakespeare initiative has certainly kept its secondary school audience in mind with its latest production, a suitably gory and modern Macbeth. Set in an army unit filled with forensic facilities that will be familiar from TV crime dramas and acrobatic ghostly witches, this 90-minute production at Shakespeare’s Globe may be light on lyricism and intent but may well be the only version of this play ever staged in which the audiences actually cheer at the bland Malcolm’s final victory.

Director Lucy Cuthbertson and the creative team have made some interesting choices, not only to cut what is already Shakespeare’s shortest play, allowing the text to be presented in a manageable single sitting, but in amping up the physical stunts and finding both the romantic and comedy plots to appeal to its audience. One of its key innovations is to retain the Porter scene – which in a heavily redacted Macbeth is usually first to go – but writing a new segment for the character to heckle the assembled crowds, essentially a piece of standup designed to embarrass a few teenagers in front of their friends seems to go down well.

It is a shame that Patrick Osborne never gets close to the meaning or complexity of his mediocre Macbeth, offering no particular interpretation other than main baddie. Shakespeare’s writing for Macbeth and the non-linear psychological trajectory are some of the most challenging to perform and few actors really understand what a mountain this role should be, but this production offers no insight into the character’s state of mind, whether he is a determined despot or a foolish victim of fate. Osborne elicits jeers when he lays violent hands on his wife but there is no poetry here, no sense of a man exhausted by destiny.

Hanora Karmen’s Lady Macbeth, however, is everything her stage husband is not, elevating her own performance to capture all the ambition, sadness and confusion that her character endures as their bloody deed haunts them through the play, a role the actor may play again someday. Despite being a very Scottish play, enhanced here by the presence of tartan, pipes and drums, none of the actors even attempts a Scottish accent which does feel a little strange and performances among the ensemble are variable.

The design concept is a strong one, the army unit idea fits all of the characters and gives the female roles additional purpose with Lady Macbeth as a member of the army medical corps and Macduff re-envisaged as a woman in a same-sex relationship. Natalie Pryce’s design hoists cargo nets around the perimeter as well as giving the gore-hungry audience plenty of bloody pools as a result of graphic throat cutting and stabbings that pepper the play, wheeling corpses off on field stretchers. The acrobatic witches played by Rhiannon Skerritt, Victoria Clow and Lucy Johnson as well as the ghost of Robert Penny’s Banquo hang from ladders, create pyramids and tumble around eliciting cheers from the groundlings whose attention is held by the deliberate physicality of this interpretation

Runs until20 April 2025