Review: Macbeth, Nottingham Playhouse

THE outstanding thing about this production is the central performance from Liam Brennan. It might be one of the best pieces of acting we’ve had at the Playhouse in recent years.

Shakespeare's text always seems strikingly realistic, and Brennan's delivery emphasises this. He fractures his lines quite often in unexpected but psychologically plausible places and he addresses his soliloquies head-on to the audience.

Allison McKenzie, as Lady Macbeth, evil-eyed from the start, gets that vaulting ambition and gradual disintegration of personality beautifully. The hand-washing scene is superb. There's a hungry, unhealthy, almost crazed sexuality in Brennan and McKenzie's first scene together.

It's notoriously easy to get the Scottish play wrong but, on the whole, Lucy Pitman-Wallace's interpretation is a good one. Save for a clunkingly inappropriate allusion to the credit crunch from Jimmy Chisholm's otherwise excellent Porter, it's gimmick-free: Pitman-Wallace doesn't try to get between Shakespeare and the audience. Costumes are early-medieval; and, reasonably for a production from Edinburgh, accents are Scottish – there's a Scottish feel to the whole thing.

In their natural habitat, the witches, covered in white rags that look like ectoplasm, are wraith-like and convincing. But their subsequent appearances, at key moments elsewhere, are over-done and obtrusive, almost comical. They even get tangled up in the final swordfight, and Macbeth's death scene is seriously spoilt.

The banquet scene, always a potential pitfall, is well done. Intentionally or not, Banquo (Martin Ledwith) looks oddly like the wounded Christ sitting at table – we could be at the last Supper or even, given the wounds, in the Upper Room.

The way that Christopher Brand makes Macduff go weak in the knees at the news of his family's murder and take it, literally, in the gut is admirably true-to-life.

But so is the whole play.

ALAN GEARY