Review Roundup: MACBETH, starring Sam Heughan and Lia Williams

Directed by Daniel Raggett, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s brings a new version of Macbeth to the small studio space in Stratford-upon-Avon. Starring Sam Heughan, best known for his role in the series Outlander, and Lia Williams as Lady Macbeth.

This staging imagines the play in a gangland pub in 20th-century Glasgow, with its characters as violent criminals.

What did the critics think?

BroadwayWorld: Cindy Marcolina: Something wicked this way comes: it’s another exciting high-concept Shakespeare. Director Daniel Raggett moves the action of the Scottish Play to a safe-house pub in the midst of a racketeering war. Succession meets Sons of Anarchy with a hint of The Sopranos in this daring, new production. With a hypnotic tempo that’s almost cinematic in nature, Raggett leaves you on the edge of your seat, gasping for air, mouth gaping and eyes wide. It’s Macbeth like you’ve never seen it before. Is it an extravagant idea on paper? It sure is. Does it work? Flawlessly so.

The Guardian: Mark Lawson: Initially risking seeming more like the petty crook Macheath (in the Beggar’s/ Threepenny Operas), Sam Heughan achieves full tragic weight, especially in the soliloquies, with “Tomorrow and tomorrow” daringly staged as a duet with a dead character. Lia Williams’ revelatory Lady Macbeth makes the verse vernacular, a line such as “here’s the smell of the blood still” sounding as modern as the Pinter and Mamet in which she previously excelled. Avoiding the stereotypical scold, she is clearly the brains of the relationship. And, without adding or rewriting speech, her role is also expanded through four additional silent scenes, deeply painful, animating the anguish of a woman who lost a child.

The Stage: Dave Fargnoli: Raggett luxuriates in the play’s violence, while his cast snarl and spit out every line, often flattening the dialogue’s nuances. Minor tweaks to the text blur characters and events together, muddying their meanings. Yet there are some brilliantly dark moments, with the supernatural elements particularly disturbing when set within this grubbily realistic location. Wall-mounted TVs subtly cloud with static whenever something spooky happens. Bloody spectres stroll through the shadows, casually pouring themselves drinks.

WhatsOnStage: Michael Davies: The biggest problem is that the new setting robs the narrative and language of all its majesty, and what should be the mighty tragedy of an upstanding hero brought down by his own inadequacies ends up, instead, as a little, seedy bar brawl for control over a bunch of thugs for whom it is impossible to feel any empathy. Just one with high production values.

The Telegraph: Dominic Cavendish: It’s a bold move to reactivate Stratford’s The Other Place as a regular performance space with Macbeth. This, after all, was the scene of Trevor Nunn’s landmark 1976 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. While not in that league, Raggett’s staging seizes every opportunity to achieve a sense of infernal intimacy. It often plunges the auditorium into total darkness, and attains the aura of a nightmare lock-in. Naturalistic logic steadily bleeds away – so that every location appears to be housed in the same claustrophobic space (the drawback, of course, is that this may confuse those unfamiliar with the work).

The Times: Dominic Maxwell: Some of the surprises come from time travelling too. Castle Dunsinane is a late-20th century gangland Glasgow public house with patterned carpet and handsomely spinning fan rotors in its false ceiling. A good night for the designer Anna Reid. The Weird Sisters sit around a pub table, which is lit by glowing lagers logos on the taps. Banquo’s ghost appears, drenched in blood, on the one spare bar stool when everyone else is sitting round four pub tables for the funeral banquet. There are a lot of vests, a few Hawaiian shirts and a singsong at the piano.

Macbeth runs at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon until 6 December.