Macbeth, Young Vic

It was clever of the Young Vic not to put an interval into their new shades-of-grey techno Macbeth, because a fair number of us would have used it as an opportunity to escape Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerlin's intellectually incoherent production. Macbeth is a naturalistic play - heaths and witches, ghosts and strange voices, woods that walk and heroes plucked untimely from their mother's wombs - but here the whole astonishing story is set in a receding, unremittingly grey, tunnel.

Anyone new to Macbeth will not know what's going on.  We could be in the Mummy's Tomb or the HS2 tunnels at Paddington. It could even - if flooded with eels, mud crabs, baby crocs, and a reality star from Geordie Shore - pass muster as a Bushtucker Trial. What it isn't is a Scotland of wars, warriors, lust, greed, and threatened ancient bloodlines.

'When shall we three meet again?' ask the witches.  What's the point, one wonders, when all they do when they meet is dance as if electrified, speaking in unison like a bank of synths from Humans. That said. the music's lively and the choreography is atmospheric, but it's not designed around the narrative and it therefore undermines it.  As Lady Macbeth, the normally brilliant Anna Maxwell-Martin garbles her Shakespeare. As Macbeth, John Heffernan looks, sounds, and feels, like a software designer who's getting steadily drunker in the bar at Shoreditch House and can't find the toilets. The only clarity comes from Prasanna Pruwanarajah as Banquo and later, weirdly, a bloke lying on the floor and speaking spookily into a microphone. It is impossible to make sense of this production without lurching into the realms of pretension. 

In conclusion: Perhaps this production is aimed at a younger audience. If so, I wonder if they've go it right?  I recall as a 12-year-old a school trip to see Macbeth with the first naked Lady Macbeth. In the stalls at the Shaw Theatre, we laughed till we cried, barely noticing the story. I didn't revisit Shakespeare for another twenty years. Beware gimmicks. 

References

Macbeth, Young Vic, Tickets

Young Vic, 66 The Cut, London SE1 8LZ  Run ends 23 January