"I have supped full with horrors," says Macbeth. After three productions in quick succession, I begin to know how he felt.
First there was Out Of Joint's African version which induced a sense of eerie complicity. Then Simon Russell Beale took us on a haunting journey into Macbeth's interior. Now comes Dominic Cooke's RSC Stratford transfer, which makes up in headlong pace what it lacks in intellectual discovery. But, after this, I'm happy to let thanes rest for a bit.
If Cooke's production reveals anything, it is that Macbeth himself is a supreme ironist. What Greg Hicks brings out superbly is the character's self-awareness and savage humour. When he says of Duncan's murder "I go and it is done" you feel Hicks knows he is speaking a lie. Equally Hicks shows how Macbeth uses irony to insulate himself from human contact: whether putting down Lennox's description of climactic chaos with "Twas a rough night" or undermining Banquo's murderers even as he employs them, you sense Macbeth is a man who knows himself well but doesn't wish to know anyone else.
The danger in highlighting Macbeth's isolation is that it undercuts his relationship with his wife. Although Hicks and Sian Thomas smooch conscientiously, you never feel that murder is a by-product of their sexual intimacy. What Thomas offers is a crystal-clear reading of a Lady Macbeth who understands her husband without being especially close to him. She registers beautifully her appalled recognition of her growing emotional redundancy.
But, although the two main performances are excellent, Cooke sets the action in a somewhat indeterminate world. The Ruritanian military uniform that Macbeth inherits from Duncan implies that we are closer to Novello's King's Rhapsody than to Shakespeare's Scottish threnody. Cooke also relies too heavily on Peter Mumford's lighting and Gary Yershon's music to evoke atmosphere: when Macbeth says "light thickens" the power should lie in the compacted poetry rather than a gradual reduction in the wattage.
I'd call it a brisk, no-frills production reinforced by a resolute Macduff from Clive Wood and a nervously excitable Banquo from Louis Hilyer. But, although it gets us out in two hours, it's not a Macbeth that's going to linger in the catalogue like Out of Joint's excursion into tyranny or Russell Beale's unforgettable anatomy of a murderer.
· Until March 5. Box office: 0870 060 6621
