The Macbeths are having a bit of a do, a celebration of victory in battle. The fridge is stocked with booze, the Macduff kids zoom around the living room on micro-scooters, a mini-skirted Lady Macbeth shimmies up against Duncan, while the king's son indulges his taste for cocaine.
Nobody even blinks when the treacherous Cawdor is executed in the middle of it, his title given to bullet-headed Macbeth. After a while, the children start playing with Cawdor's bloody corpse left lying casually on the living room floor.
Calixto Bieito's production, performed in Catalan (Spanish later in its run), is like no Macbeth that you will ever have seen. Raw and edgy, it creates a dark, gangsterish, trashy world where life comes cheap, thuggery is endemic and money and power count.
It is certainly bloody, but though it is not always bloody good it is almost always sufficiently interesting to keep your attention. And you have to keep on your toes, because Bieito has instituted some major changes to the text, including a single witch clearly keen on usurping Lady Macbeth's place.
Not that you ever feel that the director is being untrue to the play. In a sense he captures its essence, creating an already psychotic world that the murderous Macbeths simply push to the limit. Lady M's feigned epileptic fit to distract attention from her husband after the murder of Duncan is mirrored in her madness; in the final moments it is made clear that Macbeth has destroyed himself - and he knows it.
Nobody has the moral high ground, not even Banquo, whose spectral presence ruins the Macbeths' barbecue. His relationship with Fleance is based on fear and abuse.
Freedom from the constraints of language also frees Bieito from convention, but in the process he becomes self-indulgent. At 135 minutes the production is too long and is pitched too high for too long. This Lady M could really give you a headache.
But every time you think, "Well, yes, I've got this production taped now," it throws something wonderful at you, such as the murder of the Macduff family: a scene almost always an embarrassment in English productions, but that here is terrible and terribly moving.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
