Somewhere in this production lies Shakespeare’s tragedy: Almeida’s Macbeth reviewed

Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive props, glass panels, microphones, a wheelbarrow full of jackboots. The witches are not the usual vagrants or carbuncled mystics. These grim-looking ladies have expensive hairdos and nicely ironed shirts — like a panel of disgruntled academics at a tribunal.

William Gaunt is a decrepit Duncan who looks ready to receive his telegram from the Queen. He can barely rise from his NHS wheelchair. But one wonders why this frail old chap had to be knifed to death? Much easier to smother him with a pillow and claim he expired naturally. Gaunt speaks with an English accent but the rest of his court are ranting Scotsmen who wear beards and identical combat fatigues. It’s hard to distinguish one from another.

James McArdle (Macbeth) seems too nice to be a half-crazed warlord. Give him a little brewery to run in Shoreditch and he’d be fine. Saoirse Ronan (Lady Macbeth) wears a natty white catsuit and speaks her lines with a pleasant Irish brogue. At times she seems like a Ryanair stewardess stranded in a team-building exercise for angry Scottish dads. The production makes her role larger than Shakespeare intended and she witnesses the murder of Macduff’s family. This certainly helps to explain her mental collapse at the end but her death is presented as a glamorous and beautiful sacrifice. What for? She’s a bigger psycho than her husband.

The director believes that Scotland was suffering from climate change in the 11th century. There’s an electric fan to keep the castle cool as temperatures rise around the world. Meanwhile the melting ice-caps have caused the moat to flood, and a shallow pool of water spreads inexorably across the stage during the action.