The Court Theatre’s Macbeth presents Scotland as a dark, apocalyptic and semi-urban ‘no-when’, torn by years of bitter warfare and shaped by banked up gravel and falling snow. Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy is a well-worn crowd pleaser, and this production takes full advantage of the play’s horrors – both supernatural and wholly man-made – in its presentation of a kingdom in the throes of collapse.

Director Ross Gumbley and assistant director Melanie Luckman offer a world in which everything is cold and broken, with even the marching of Birnam Wood taking on a decidedly inorganic bent.

Harold Moot’s set is a marvel: enormous but disintegrating reinforced concrete pillars lean at awkward angles, their faces cracked and pocked with bullet holes, the exposed and rusting twisted steel expressing the violent contortions of the shattered kingdom of Scotland.

Giles Tanner’s stark yet expressive lighting manipulates the darkened spaces formed by these hard and broken edges, while Tina Hutchison-Thomas’s gorgeous costuming combines military utilitarianism with winter’s dark furs and heavy, muted fabrics. I am particularly taken with Henri Kerr’s eerie, throbbing electronic soundscapes, which seem to rip a page straight out of horror auteur and composer John Carpenter’s playbook.  

The production also honours the three-as-one nature of the uncanny witches (Kathleen Burns, Raewyn Lippert, and Brylee Lockheart). They are presented as eerie, white-haired, blind-eyed augurs, whose influence is often felt, rather than seen, through the manipulation of sound and lighting. 

Mark Hadlow offers a strong Macbeth whose complexity unfolds over the course of the show’s two hours, and I would happily watch Lara Macgregor’s marvellously textured Lady Macbeth all night. The scenes between the two thrum with tension. Coming to the show having seen Macgregor and Hadlow share the stage a number of times offers a wonderful sense of intertextual richness to their relationship.

The cast, on the whole, is a strong ensemble, and some of the character decisions pay off well. In particular, the decision to pitch Banquo (the wonderful Tom Peters) as jocular and swaggering offers well-considered moments of levity but also charts, by comparison, Macbeth’s shift from soldier to murderous autocrat.

This is a coherent, fully-formed world, and there are compelling moments of power and focus – such as Macbeth’s mid-dinner meltdown, Macduff (a nuanced Owen Black) learning of the death of his family, and pretty much anything that Lady Macbeth does – but there are some wrinkles that need to be ironed out. 

I had an enormous problem with the slick, break-neck pace of last year’s production of Romeo and Juliet, likewise directed by Gumbley, and here there are some similar instances where interior moments of reasoning and decision-making are lost in the chaos or skated over in the interest of maintaining an action-packed pace. This is especially apparent in earlier parts of the play as Macbeth’s ambition is first sparked and then stoked, and later when we see his ambitions and his willingness to transgress finally overtake the initial avarice of his wife. Too often things just seem to happen, rather than be thought about and then acted upon. 

Those who are quite familiar with the play won’t have a problem charting points upon which these key moments pivot, although the people next to me were often whispering quietly to each other as they tried to figure out the details. I suspect that this, along with other issues of clarity and precision, will ease and settle as the production is broken in.

Similarly, a great deal of speech is delivered as actors face upstage, and while this isn’t always an issue – and I’m really fond of the angular blocking, although my more traditionalist companion grumbles about not being able to see faces – those performers without the vocal dexterity and precision of seasoned performers like Mark Hadlow, Tom Peters, Kim Garrett (Lady Macduff) and Lara Macgregor sometimes suffer. There’s a balance to be found, still, between rapid delivery and clear, unmuddied articulation.

None of this gets in the way of the broader enjoyment of the audience though, even in light of the particularly misanthropic and violent interpretation of the ending. The Court’s presentation of Macbeth’s shift from ambitious soldier to tyrannous despot and his ultimately bloody defeat is grimly satisfying.

And yet, given all the effort that has gone into creating this cohesive sense of tone and world, I am baffled as to why it was deemed necessary to have the clownish Porter (Jared Corbin) deliver an aside to the audience about the opaqueness of some of the 400 year-old jokes. While this scene functions in the script as an almost outrageous juxtaposition of drunken tomfoolery with the murder of the King, this is a bizarre and jarring addition, utterly at odds with the tenor of the production.  

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