Shakespeare's Scottish play has provoked all manner of adaptations from Joe Macbeth to Kurosawa's masterly Throne of Blood. But Ionesco's Macbett, first staged in 1972, offers little more than a quirky, parodic footnote that represents the last gasp of Theatre of the Absurd.
Ionesco's play is based on a simple proposition: that all political systems are equally corrupt. Archduke Duncan, in this version, is a crazed tyrant who governs through terror. The martial Macbett, driven by lust for Lady Duncan, supplants him only to turn into a manic monster. And he is eventually replaced by Duncan's son who appropriates Malcolm's tactical speech of self-denigration from Shakespeare's play to suggest "better Macbett than such a one to reign".
But the idea that all power structures are comparably bad strikes me as historically facile and dramatically flawed. Even as a cartoonish study of monarchical egoism, Macbett was pre-empted by Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. If Ionesco's play survives, it is largely for a few strokes of verbal wit, vividly realised in Tanya Ronder's new version. Duncan, after a triumphal battle, lies and tells his subjects, "It's your throne too"; Macbett, after being visited by ghosts, sarcastically enquires, "Any more dead people coming tonight?"
Silviu Purcarete directs his fellow Romanian's work with all the visual flair at his command: he lends the action a carnivalesque grotesquerie, symbolised by Duncan's Falstaffian delight in consuming raw eggs. However, the production's frenzied vitality cannot disguise the reductive nihilism of Ionesco's philosophy.
· Until July 21. Box office: 0844 800 1110.
