From Olivier Award-winning company Cheek by Jowl (Cymbeline, 2007 Spring Season) comes a scintillating take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth that is physical, psychologically taut, and unsettling to the bone. Declan Donnellan directs, Nick Ormerod provides the elegantly restrained sets, and the exceptional Will Keen (Foyle’s War) delivers a wrenching account of the title role, conveying the doomed general’s emotional turmoil with chilling authenticity.
One brilliant move follows another: Shakespeare’s infamous witches, here distilled to haunting voices, absolutely terrify in their evanescence as the actors move like phantasms across the shadow-flecked stage. All the while, the madness of Lady Macbeth (the magnetic Anastasia Hille) accelerates with fatal inexorability. Toxically enmeshed, the lady and her lord inhabit a single, conflicted consciousness, one that festers in self-loathing even as it blindly seeks the destruction that will ultimately be its own.
Dates
April 5 - 17th 2011
Run time: 2 hours, no intermission