It used to be said that no actor ever succeeded as Macbeth and that it was more a brilliant poem than a stageable play. Both ideas have been knocked on the head in my lifetime. As a teenager, I was lucky enough to see Olivier's guilt-haunted, spiritually desolate Macbeth (1955) three times. Two later productions forced one to re-examine the play itself. Trevor Nunn in 1976 turned Stratford's The Other Place – nothing more than a converted tin shed – into a place of conspiratorial black magic: we, the audience, sat around a chalk circle in which Ian McKellen's thane and Judi Dench's Lady Macbeth seemed to be in touch with the forces of darkness. Then in 2007 Rupert Goold directed a production, first in Chichester and later in the West End and New York, that seemed even more horrific: the Witches appeared in the guise of ministering nurses, blood spewed out of kitchen-taps and Patrick Stewart turned Macbeth into a figure of Stalinesque monstrosity. Among many visiting Macbeths, I also recall Yukio Ninagawa's Japanese production (Edinburgh 1985), which with its cascading cherry-blossom and plangent music became a melancholic meditation on human transience.
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