Abstract
Since August 2023, Macbeth has been performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare's Globe, played across the country in Simon Godwin's site-specific production starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma. So, it's fair to say that Shakespeare's Scottish play has been somewhat ubiquitous on the English stage recently, and now appears at the Donmar Warehouse in perhaps the most hotly anticipated production of them all. There is considerable Shakespearean pedigree in both the leading cast and creatives of this production: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are played by David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, two of the best Hamlets of the last fifteen years, and it is directed by Max Webster, who was previously at the helm at the Donmar with his hypermodern Henry V starring Kit Harrington, which featured an inventive opening composed of sections from both parts of Henry IV, utilised pop music and bold lighting choices, and took an uncompromisingly brutal and bombastic approach to the play's themes of nationalism, war and conquest.
The sense of anticipation is heightened on entering the theatre, where the set is viewable as an open, minimal black and white space, its only adornment a large basin in the centre of the floor. Located at the back of the stage is a raised platform covered with transparent glass. When not onstage, actors remain visible behind this sheet, maintaining a connection both as a company and with the audience. Adding to the intrigue, we discover that we will be wearing headphones throughout the play. These were to be found on each audience member's seat and had been promised in marketing materials to deliver a binaural sound design that would immerse us within the world of Macbeth. Having donned these and checked, as instructed, that they were, indeed, operational, it was noted that they were also strangely comfortable. So far, so good. There was a frisson of isolation, the shock of the new, a feeling that when one is used to experiencing Shakespeare, declaimed aloud in the company of others, It feels somehow secretive and personal, like listening to the radio or a podcast on personal headphones.
As the production begins, we are plunged into darkness with Act 1, Scene 1 delivered as an audio-only scene, the familiar words of the three witches rattling hauntingly around our skulls, no visuals to distract. Suddenly, without warning, the stage is flooded with light to show Tennant's bloodied Macbeth, post-battle, washing his hands in the basin. This early image of handwashing is readily connected to Lady Macbeth's final appearance, where she attempts to obliterate the ‘damned spot’ (5.1.35) of blood. Webster's decision to have it first associated instead with her husband is just the first of many dramaturgical decisions that unsettle audience expectations and preconceptions, and which help to make this an extraordinarily fresh and exciting take on Macbeth, Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. The production runs at just one hour and 55 minute without interval, and streamlines the play in such a way that it becomes extremely easy to follow. Extraneous thanes are dispensed with, and their parts are absorbed by characters of greater significance to the narrative. Some historical references have been subtly modernised or simplified to make them easier to comprehend, but never in such a way that it becomes distracting or incongruous. For example, Macbeth's reply to the witches in his first scene that ‘[b]y Finel's death, I know I am Thane of Glamis’ (1.3.71) becomes ‘[s]ince my father's death I know I’m Thane of Glamis’ (Webster 12). This change retains the same number of syllables but removes the name of Macbeth's father instead simply describing who he is by relationship. Although hardly a significant line or a radical dramaturgical decision, a simple modification like this retains the structure of Shakespeare's language, whilst giving the audience the essential information they require to understand the complicated hierarchy of eleventh-century Scotland.
Macbeth (David Tennant) in Macbeth, Donmar Warehouse. Photo by Marc Brenner.
One of Webster's more significant choices pertains to Lady Macbeth. The character is offstage for long stretches of Shakespeare's play, but in this production she is given an expanded role thanks to another clever dramaturgical choice, namely her meeting with Lady Macduff at the start of 4.2 before the latter lady and her children are murdered. The three witches – so often the stumbling block in any production of Macbeth – never appear onstage and are instead represented either by the binaural sound design, as in the first scene, or, in one of the production's most powerful moments, by the ensemble. Indeed, every actor in the company besides Tennant and Jumbo, plays a part in this many-headed chorus in addition to their own core roles. In Macbeth's second encounter with the witches, the newly crowned king was plunged into a hellscape reminiscent of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Tennant was raised aloft by his castmates, who passed the actor around and shared the witches’ lines. When such physical theatre was blended with the interior intensity engendered by Gareth Fry's innovative sound design, through headphones, the effect was extremely powerful; both disorientating and terrifying. In this way, the production relied on the power of suggestion and the ‘show don’t tell’ rule of psychological horror.
The company of Macbeth, Donmar Warehouse. Photo by Marc Brenner.
The production packs an emotional punch thanks to its uniformly moving and powerful performances across the ensemble. Especially worthy of note are Macduff (Noof Ousellam), Ros Watt (Malcolm), and Moyo Akandé (Ross), for a most compelling version of 4.3. This scene shifts the action to England and gives the audience a rare break from the machinations of the Macbeth power couple. In many productions, this change of setting can disrupt the intense waves of tension that have been rising to this point. Here, it was moving, succinct, and broke the scene down to its essential purposes: Macduff needs to be set on a revenge narrative course against Macbeth when he learns about the murder of his wife and children, and Malcolm needs to manipulate these events for his own ends. In yet another dramaturgical masterstroke, Webster helped sharpen the scene's focus by cutting lines in which Malcolm promises that Macbeth's evil is just a warm-up act for his own tenure as king. Ousellam was able to capture the pointless cruelty of Macbeth's actions through the numbness with which he responded to the tragic news, aided by Akandé's stoic performance as Ross, who commanded the audience's attention whenever she appeared onstage.
The pairing of Tennant and Jumbo promised much, and the duo certainly delivered. Too often, the Macbeths are driven by ruthlessness and relish for the acts of violence that can detract from their unusually close bond for a married Shakespearean couple, affording the audience little sense of who these people were before circumstances overtook them. Both seemed broken before the action started, haunted by images of lost children and a palpable sorrow visible in each character. Jumbo was a magnificent Lady Macbeth, displaying genuine affection towards her husband. Her status as an outsider in this kingdom was emphasised by the fact that she was the only English-accented actor in an otherwise Scottish company. The character further stood out due to designer Rosanna Vize's clever decision to dress Jumbo in a white dress in contrast to her castmates, all of whom wore various versions of a dun-coloured kilt and sweater. This underlined her status as somehow ‘other’ within this world and explicitly representative of a purity that is sullied by the murderous events of the play. Jumbo played the character's gradual psychological deterioration brilliantly, seeming to be genuinely disturbed by her husband's growing paranoia. She gave a moving performance in her madness scene, without histrionics but with a palpable sense of loss: she has lost a child, she has lost her husband, and now she has lost herself.
Lady Macbeth (Cush Jumbo) and Lady Macduff (Rona Morison) in Macbeth, Donmar Warehouse. Photo by Marc Brenner.
Tennant captured every shade necessary to nail the complexity of Macbeth's character; he was by turns intense, funny, charismatic, nasty, and world-weary. Indeed, in this role, he keyed into his great chameleonic talent for playing both charismatic, flawed heroes in Doctor Who and Casanova, and unsettling, unhinged villains in Jessica Jones and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Two particularly harrowing and brutal aspects to his Macbeth feature near the end of the play. Firstly, he taunted the doctor who has cared for his wife, playing with the old man by placing his foot on his chest in a cruelly protracted manner that shows the complete breakdown of his moral compass by this point. The callousness of this moment is emphasised by the fact that the same actor (Benny Young) who played Duncan also plays the doctor. Secondly, the brief exchange between Macbeth and Young Siward (Raffi Phillips) was made especially shocking due to Young Siward being played by a child. In an unexpected act of apparent kindness, Macbeth beckoned the boy towards him and embraced him, in an image clearly intended to remind the audience of the possibility that he and Lady Macbeth have previously lost a child. This was undercut by Macbeth snapping the boy's neck, with the audible crack drawing gasps of astonishment from the audience.
Tennant was outstanding throughout this production, but he was especially compelling in its final act, where he created a palpable sense of the world closing in on Macbeth. He delivered the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) lament in a simplistic, naturalistic way that was neither throwaway nor bombastic. This is a man who realises that he has lost his last hope with his wife's death and has nothing left to lose. The character's numb realisation that the end was in sight was borne out by Webster's audacious staging of Macbeth's final showdown with Macduff. As he revealed he ‘was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped’ (5.8.15–16), Ousellam's muscular Macduff seemed to tower over Tennant's angular Macbeth, whereupon Macbeth's astonished response was to drop his sword, approach Macduff, and begin repeatedly to slap him across the face. The act was not that of a Scottish king facing down his adversary in single combat, but one small boy goading another in the school playground. This interpretation should have been anticlimactic. On the contrary, it rendered Macbeth pathetic, helpless, and oddly sympathetic. In a tragedy where directors too rarely recognise the potential for comic interpretation, it also made Tennant's last moments onstage unexpectedly comic, such was the absurdity of his final act.
Macduff (Noof Ousellam) and Macbeth (David Tennant) in Macbeth, Donmar Warehouse. Photo by Marc Brenner.
The only true moment of comedy that is expressly called for by Shakespeare's text is the appearance of the Porter in 2.3. Webster used the production as an opportunity to lampoon the very innovation that made this Macbeth so distinctive. Jatinder Singh Randhawa's ebullient Porter was situated in the balcony before exiting the stage but remained audible as he tried to re-enter the theatre, an attempt that was initially denied. When he did successfully return, Randhawa delivered his lines in the front row to the audience, thus occupying the space of platea that allows a character to traverse the boundary between the fiction and the audience's reality. The scene was almost entirely re-written and drew particular laughter when Randhawa remarked what a poor Christmas present it would be to buy a ticket to attend a glorified radio drama, given that the audience were wearing headphones. Consequently, rather than jarring tonally with the rest of the play, as can sometimes happen with this speech, the Porter was imbued with the specific purpose of localising the action and reminding the audience of the precise theatrical nature of this event.
The production's arresting final image reflected the return of light to Scotland following Macbeth's defeat. Behind the glass strip were revealed to be trees – not only representing the prophesised Birnam Wood – but hinting at a feeling of hope and renewal in nature. No attempt was made here to create a sense of the play's events becoming cyclical, as with Roman Polanski's 1971 film where Donalbain meets the witches, or the idea that the incoming administration will be just as brutal as the last, as explored in David Greig's 2010 play Dunsinane. Instead, it was more reminiscent of Anthony Neilson's Unreachable at the Royal Court in 2016, which also ended with a forest onstage and starred Matt Smith, coincidentally Tennant's successor in Doctor Who. In this Macbeth, the mood was that the tyrant is dead, and society is trying to move on and to rebuild. For a world ravaged by political instability and extremism as well as ever-growing environmental turmoil, it was moving to witness a production of this play that attempted to offer hope to its audience that, out of darkness, a better future might be built.