There is no shortage of ideas in Richard Twyman’s English Touring Theatre co-production, the latest in an autumn glut of Macbeths. This one starts not with Shakespeare but with a puritan witch trial, à la The Crucible, to highlight the real fear of the supernatural that stalked the playwright’s society.
The talk is of cats, brooms and facial abnormalities. The supposed culprits remain silent. “Women of Prescot, the spirits do suck on the blood of your private parts,” warn their accusers.
Rather than return directly to this theme, Twyman frees the witches to haunt the play. They appear as an echoing flashback in Macbeth’s memory or as horror movie zombies in blond wigs and blue pinafore dresses, all cackling and heavy breath. In a Burns supper of a banquet scene, they take possession of the Macbeths, who recite the “double, double toil and trouble” speech over a haggis. They are less characters than shape-shifting manifestations of evil.
It is a lively approach, but too many ideas are dropped as soon as they are picked up. The theatre’s new frons scenae, the backdrop that turns the circular auditorium into a horseshoe shape, is a good cover for secret kitchen conversations next to a fridge stocked with Tennent’s. But the breast pump removed by Lady Macbeth (Laura Elsworthy) before her “unsex me here” speech fails to raise the expected questions about motherhood, and why Malcolm (Jasmine Elcock) feels the need to sing Yes Sir, I Can Boogie is anyone’s guess.
That the reordering of early scenes gives us the witches’ prophecy after Macbeth has murdered Duncan, providing the motivation after the crime, is another sign of overthinking.
Yet the production is more coherent than all this sounds. It is anchored by Mike Noble’s Macbeth, soft spoken and mild mannered, the kind of warrior who takes his boots off to protect the living room carpet. Spurred on but not overwhelmed by Elsworthy’s Lady Macbeth, his equal in love and crime, he is a humble man paying the price for a hasty decision. If he is too introspective to be convincingly tyrannical, he conveys the horror of an everyman who is isolated and out of his depth.
• At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 23 September. Touring until 24 February.
