The Arcola in east London has been firing on all cylinders, but it shudders to a halt with this production, which only serves to remind that badly produced Shakespeare is not just tedious but torture.
The omens were rather good: the lead actors - Jack Shepherd and Amanda Boxer - are decent, and the evening begins impressively with three particularly strange Weird Sisters emerging from the audience. After that, however, it is downhill to Dunsinane, with no one in any particular hurry to get on with it. Macbeth has an urgent rhythm, the headlong rush of a good story that has to be told. Hence the decision often taken to play it straight through to its bloody conclusion without an interval. Here it meanders on for close to three hours, almost devoid of narrative tension and urgency.
Telling the story is clearly not a priority for the directors, Shepherd and Mehmet Ergen, but it is hard to work out where their intentions lie. Take Shepherd's Macbeth. This is a man of no discernible personality except vague puzzlement. Shepherd frequently acts the meaning of individual words in the verse rather than the meaning behind them. The result is a performance that is colourless and fussy at the same time.
Boxer fares slightly better, giving a traditional nasty-piece-of-work reading of Lady Macbeth, at one point hinting that childlessness (or the death of a child) has hardened her. This is a competent performance, as are Jonathan Moore's Banquo and Clarence Smith's Macduff. Competent, but no more. Matthew Coombes makes his mark as Malcolm, enlivening the second half with intelligence and an ability to speak the lines so that they don't sound as if they have been in mothballs for the past 400 years. Most of the rest make you wonder whether a drama school training is of any worth whatsoever.
The apparent aimlessness of this production may spring partly from the difficulties of the very wide space. The design goes some way to solving the problem, and its series of doors offers opportunities to develop both the supernatural and oppressive elements of the play. It is a pity, then, that the directors did not use its possibilities more inventively.
· Until June 1. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
