Sean Bean certainly has one quality demanded of Macbeth: what his good lady calls "rugged looks". But craggy virility of itself is not enough for Shakespeare's tortured thane; although Bean's performance is no disgrace, it is like Edward Hall's production in that it rarely rises above a dogged competence reminiscent of the Old Vic of the 1950s.
Nothing less than a spark of genius will do for Macbeth - as Olivier, McKellen and Sher have shown down the years. What Bean offers instead is a rough-hewn, Geordie-accented soldier strangely lacking in inner turmoil. This is not a man, you feel, who is prey to "horrible imaginings" and when he cries "Stars, hide your fires" it is with the vocal flatness of one who might be chatting to his batman. Admittedly, Bean improves rapidly once crowned, and sets about disposing of his rivals with suitable savagery. Although strong in action, Bean is weak in soliloquy, and misses the essential point that Macbeth has the soul of a poet trapped in the body of a murderer.
Fortunately he has a vibrant partner in Samantha Bond. Lady Macbeth's hold over her husband is explicitly sexual, so she celebrates his return with a tumble in bed in which she, significantly, ends on top. Even more to the point, Bond knows exactly how to use the language: highlighting Shakespeare's verbal antitheses on lines like "wouldst not play false and yet wouldst wrongly win". Bond also incites her husband to murder with just the right mix of stick and carrot; one minute pummelling his chest, the next voraciously kissing him. She is so good that you regret, more than ever, the character's disappearance.
For the rest, this is a standard-issue production that is briskly staged rather than imaginatively rethought. Played out on what looks like a bombed-out church designed by Michael Pavelka, it has speed but no visible destination. If the Weird Sisters, played as enticing young women, are meant to run the show, you wonder why they disappear with Malcolm's ascent. And the doubling of Duncan and the Porter seems inexplicable except that it keeps that excellent actor, Julian Glover, on stage for a fraction longer.
Much of the production, however, seems an assemblage of tricks Hall has used in earlier Shakespeare productions: flashing lights, SAS gunman for the final carnage, and Latin anthems to denote spirituality. Though the externals are fine, it is a measure of the production's failure to explore the play's innards that, when Adrian Schiller's Malcolm describes Macbeth as "this dead butcher", the phrase for once seems apt. I submit, however, there is more to this great play than Saturday-night melodrama.
· Booking until February 1. Box office: 020-7369 1740.
