Macbeth Review – A terrifying confinement with bloodied and drunk gangsters | Royal Shakespeare Company

AAudiences arriving to find the RSC Studio Theater equipped with bar seating may worry that they have mistakenly booked for plays The Weir or Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints ​​set in Irish pubs.

However, this place is Scottish and is run by Macbeth, a Glasgow gangster, and his wife who could be called, in this reading, the landlady Macbeth. The inn is not named, although we might guess the king’s head because the events of Shakespeare’s tragedy were largely unchanged by transmission. Duncan, a camel-covered drug dealer with a scar on his cheek like chain mail, is staying in one of the available rooms but won’t post a good review on TripAdvisor.

Classic purists may react to this beer release by wondering what else the RSC can’t be trusted to regulate at a brewery. But having concluded after the Macbeth crawl of 2023 – during which I saw five productions in quick succession – that there was perhaps no new way to do the play, Daniel Raggett’s bold staging proved me wrong.

The text is interestingly adapted to the drinking den. When Banquo asks, “Give us a light over there!”, the landlady hits him with a disposable bomb. Thugs who use knives still call them “swords”, but that – and the tendency to address each other as kings and princes – seems plausible within the grandiose rhetoric of gangsters. Banquo’s ghost ambushes Duncan.

The textual trimming is consistently clever. Several minor characters – including the old man and the two doctors – are combined into one Catholic priest, which is justified by the text’s use of the honorific ‘father’ for the elder, and the addition of a background element of Celtic sectarianism. Christopher Patrick Nolan plays the killer’s confessor with great fear.

The biggest challenge is the evil sisters, even for those with a few, boozers obviously don’t include the supernatural (outside the scope of The Weir). Raggett reimagines the odd trio as tough, judgmental drinkers sharing a table and turns the problematic, haunting scenes of “Hecate” into a kind of evocation of confinement. It’s truly creepy as is the entire theatrical show, which was quickly staged with a sudden, alarming power outage. The context of the gang wars creates a terrible and palpable danger once Macbeth kills the big man.

At first, Sam Heughan risks sounding like the small-time crook Macheath (in Beggar’s/Threepenny Opera), and achieves full tragic heaviness, especially in his soliloquies, with “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” boldly presented as a duet with a dead character. Leah Williams’ Lady Macbeth revelation makes poetry colloquial, a line like “Here’s the smell of blood still” sounds as modern as Pinter and Mamet had previously excelled. By avoiding the typical rebuke, it is clear that she is the mastermind of the relationship. Without adding or rewriting the words, her role is also expanded through four additional silent scenes, which are extremely painful and bring to life the suffering of a woman who has lost her child.

The ubiquity of Macbeth plays can risk the play sounding like a little beer but that’s vintage Scotch.