A sense of mental overload is there from the start as Tennant’s black-kilted and booted warrior, with bloodied hands and face, kneels on a plain white platform stage at a basin to wash (a prefiguring of his later actions), fatigued after battle, the opening reports of which are fed into our ear-pieces instead of being relayed in the flesh.
There’s next to nothing of the cheeky charm that the actor, 52, often brings to the Bard; he has an angular intentness and develops a stronger air of fixity once possessed with the idea of the seized succession, finally attaining a wheeling derangement. The idea that his own lack of progeny is an unhealed wound and the Achilles’ heel of his power-lust is brought home – we see him sit broodingly at one side of the stage, while Cal Macaninch’s Banquo cuddles and converses with his boy. In another telling moment, again, Jumbo – a distinctive English voice in a predominantly Scottish company and terrific throughout, at once thoughtful and heartless – strokes the air, as if still hankering for the child she lost, as she sways in her somnambulant state.
None of this is done heavy-handedly; it’s as if the play is being discovered for the first time – the directorial concept never impedes the fluency and spontaneity of the performances. For almost two hours, you’re held in the play’s grip until Tennant’s physically prostrate and profusely bleeding monarch lies felled, and alone, like a sacrificial victim; we gaze upon the corpse, while hearing, as if through his dying senses, the final exchanges between the departed company – an act of risk-taking theatre that also feels darkly, magically, like real-life.
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