Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

live performance from the Donmar Warehouse (2024) screened on 11 February 2025

A chance to revisit the excellent production directed last year by Max Webster featuring David Tennant as Macbeth and Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth, with a supporting cast refreshingly speaking almost universally with Scottish accents (except for the children Fleance, the young Macduff, and the young Siward).

In the auditorium the audience was provided with headphones to listen to the entire play, which was performed without an interval to maximise the ongoing tension. In the cinema we heard the text through the normal speaker system, but it remained intimate and happily devoid of the jarring effect of listening in a different medium to voices projecting for the stage. The eeriness of the encounters with the weird sisters, and Macbeth's terror at witnessing Banquo's ghost, remained powerful; indeed the soundscape in general transferred well.

There were some aspects of the production that I had forgotten, but which the camerawork reminded me of. In particular a generic young boy was occasionally visible throughout the play, though generally not on stage - the back wall could be opaque or transparent as the lighting changed. This pointed up the unresolved question of whether Macbeth had a son or not (the textual evidence seems contradictory on this point); or perhaps it signified that he was betraying his personal innocence by pursuing his ambition. This culminated in a brief moment when Macbeth held the boy, perhaps MacDuff's son, in his arms only to pass him on to a murderer; and later, in grappling with the young Siward, there was another embrace in which the king broke the boy's neck.

As in the production at the Almeida, it appeared that Lady Macbeth was discussing Macduff's absence with Lady Macduff (it is the thane Ross in the text); but the link to Lady Macbeth's mental distress so powerfully evoked at the Almeida, where she actually witnessed the massacre of the Macduff family, was not pursued here. 

I had also forgotten the updated speech of the porter, who knowingly engaged with the audience, making some disparaging remarks about London audiences (as perceived by those north of the border), and complaining that he didn't have headphones so he couldn't hear what was being said. This was a clever adaptation of a long speech which, though vital to the dramatic shape of the play, often runs the risk of being tedious for a modern audience, since its references are 'topical' to the sixteenth century rather than our own.

All in all, this was a fine opportunity to revisit an outstanding production of the play.

(See also my review of the Almeida production from October 2021, and a paragraph in the "seen in 2024" post, to see how differently the two directors approached this plays problems.)