Filter’s offbeat, irreverent versions of Shakespeare in which sound plays a significant component have often been not just eyecatching but eye and ear-opening too. Its Twelfth Night got to the musical, melancholic heart of the play, and there was a mad anarchic wonder to 2012’s delicious A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Filter says it doesn’t just want to engage with the darker side of Macbeth, but make it playful, too. That might well be a misguided notion, like trying to locate cuddly humanity in Isis, and this pared version of the tragedy is often at its best when at its bleakest.
As you’d expect from this company, noise is at the heart of the production, with the witches first discovered like a gaggle of sound technicians interfering with sonic waves and radio reception, conjuring the malevolent in vibrations and hums. Tom Haines’s score combines the disconcertingly supernatural with the maggoty, worming its way inside your brain. There are terrific moments: the knocking at the gate rises until it sounds like thunder; the murder of Lady Macduff and her children is indicated with a baby monitor suddenly switched off; the advance of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane comes with a chorus of birdsong. When Macbeth confronts the witches, their cackles seem to echo to hell and back.
The playful is less successful. There’s a great moment featuring a GCSE cribsheet, but other touches, including party bags for the doomed feast at which the murdered Banquo appears, are distracting. When they are allowed to get on with it, Ferdy Roberts and Poppy Miller’s bloodstained Macbeths have a fierce, wintry intensity, increasingly drained and distracted. As if somebody is whispering something inside their heads that only they can hear.
• Until 15 February. Details: 020-7620 3364. Venue: The Vaults, London. Then touring until 14 March.
