A television screen flickers, blood gushes from a tap, screams and maniacal laughter tear the air. Shakespeare’s nightmarish vision of regicide meets the aesthetic of the horror movie in Rupert Goold’s heart-stopping, hair-raising headrush of a production.

When Goold directed Patrick Stewart last year in The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company the results were richly rewarding. So their next collaboration was keenly anticipated. It doesn’t disappoint.

Sexy, gruesome, imbued by turns with a chilling brutality and a wild, almost Dionysian glee, it thrillingly yokes the terrors of the modern world to the supernatural.

Expert View

It is a hotbed of sexual intrigue and lush couplings, both gay and straight

Debra Craine

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Stewart’s Macbeth is an enthralling creation of frailty, appetite, egotism and grim humour. And the production reconfirms Goold as one of the most exciting young talents working in British theatre today.

The play begins, noisily and gorily, in a military field hospital. Wounded soldiers groan in agony; the bloody sergeant bearing news from the front undergoes a transfusion while he speaks. When he goes into cardiac arrest and dies, the three hatchet-faced nurses attending him reveal themselves, in a witty coup de théâtre, as the witches — malevolent and merciless totems of a dictatorship caught in an endless cycle of violence.

Anthony Ward’s design, with its smeared white tiles and industrial, double-grilled lift, is a stark, creepily abattoir-like environment that becomes flooded with resonances. Second World War uniforms rub shoulders with 21st-century fatigues, video imagery shows Soviet-style military parades, while a torture scene arrestingly suggests the videoing of kidnap victims that has become a tactic of extreme Islam. There are also echoes of the Ceausescu and Milosevic regimes, with the ferocious ambition of Kate Fleetwood as Stewart’s murderous wife reminiscent of the Balkan Lady Macbeth, Mirjana Markovic.

The onslaught of ideas and visuals is relentless, with Shakespeare’s poetry occasionally a casualty. But Stewart and Fleetwood are never overwhelmed by the vivid invention that surrounds them. For Stewart’s ageing Macbeth, the witches’ promises of a final crowning glory are a particularly dangerous temptation. His much younger, fatally glamorous wife’s insistence on going through with Duncan’s murder is bolstered by her sexual power over him, and his fear of losing her — he lustfully grasps her crotch as they seal the deal. Once king, Stewart places his hand on Fleetwood’s breast — and withdraws it in disgust as he realises that his desire is dead.

They are a stellar celebrity couple gone bad; she a glittering hostess, all Nigella Lawson purrs and smiles in heels and apron dispensing titbits, he at first the respected, later feared, military supremo and politician. As they withdraw into separate spheres of madness, Stewart’s Macbeth indulges increasingly in grotesque gestures of power and mirthless jokes. It’s a gripping performance — entirely fresh, yet it calls to mind every despot from Stalin to Saddam.

It’s the dark, throbbing heart of a production of blood, guts and brilliance.

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