Macbeth

As a portrait of minds going awry this production is an artistic triumph, but many in the audience won't rate it as their favourite Macbeth. And King James would have hated it. How could so much fine acting and intelligent direction not deliver a hit from such an accessible classic? It's because Shakespeare's tightest masterpiece has so much of interest (ace language, cracking plot, memorable theatrical gimmicks) that to focus with unflinching intensity on one aspect (in this case the inner worlds of the main characters) necessarily entails loss of attention elsewhere: to some this removes distraction, to others it sacrifices entertainment value. What's left here in the Bell Shakespeare Company's latest is a psychological disaster movie without special effects to pander to the box office.

James would have resented the removal of almost every visual reference to his native Scotland other than the very real-looking heath across the stage floor. There's no castle, no throne, no flags, no cut branches of Birnam Wood, no cauldrons bubbling over with haggis of newt and toad. No smoke machine belches fake fog across the moor; instead a mist is suggested by a large mirror angled above that stage. Anna Cordingley's marshy set has a strange beauty, as if a Pre-Raphaelite painter were having an opium dream on a moonlit night. Damien Cooper's lighting from both sides makes most players look slightly demonic – and indeed most of them are.

The spectacle that James and some theatregoers might miss most is the theatrical vilification and punishment of a treacherous usurper and his evil co-conspirator wife. Despite the plot's pandering to James's ancestors with its historically inaccurate revisions (the real Macbeth's reign from 1040 to 1057 was relatively long and peaceful, not nasty, brutish and short), Shakespeare's Mr & Mrs M are not sketched as cutout villains but are adorned in detail as an outwardly attractive, aspirational couple. A lesser playwright might have written a reassuring episode of Regicide: The Gunpowder Plotter Punished; Shakespeare made his characters a warning that we are all soaking in a potential catastrophe.

While he was King James VI of Scotland, the monarch found time to write a rather technical book titled Daemonologie, endorsing witch-hunting. He would likely dismiss with contempt the decision to turn Shakespeare's "three weird sisters" from bearded old hags into a single young succubus (Lizzie Schebesta); she seems closer to psychiatric patient with multiple personality disorder than the now discredited supernatural being. The famous lines "Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble" are babbled sometimes so quickly as to be unrecognisable, like a hasty, perfunctory prayer. Schebesta's split-face makeup remains as she doubles various minor roles, suggesting the threat is widespread, and she even makes love to the ghost of Macbeth's second victim, Banquo. The take-home message that this production chooses to underline is not that king-killers are beasts who will be punished, but that virtually anybody could become deranged and murder someone, even a good ruler. This is a disturbing thought for any audience, royal or common.

James would have hated Colin Moody as his ancestor Duncan, generally played as an avuncular grey-haired figurehead whose majestic decency warrants our sympathy. Moody gives us a brusque, battle-hardened military micro-manager promoted past his competence. The least justifiable action in this production is his slap to the face of his eldest son Malcolm, just before naming him as his successor. This is inconsistent with Macbeth's description of Duncan as a monarch who "hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been so clear in his great office," but Moody does turn this brief, bland role into a stimulating element of the conflict. He is also thought-provoking as the porter in the famous scene beginning "Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old [plenty of] turning the key." This role is a challenge on a stage with no castle. Moody addresses the Knocker in reverent awe as if He were a jealous pre-Christian God. Has Duncan been reincarnated? It's a harsh treatment, because these 41 lines are the only comic relief in an otherwise relentless tragedy.

Most of Macbeth's 690 lines are spoken very slowly and with constant thought and clarity, by Dan Spielman. This prolongs and intensifies the torment: try taking nine seconds to say aloud "O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!" A faster pacing would deliver snappier dramatic progress, but that was not sought here. Spielman's manner sometimes seems rather matter-of-fact for a man who is bent on murdering several of his associates' children, but for much of the play Macbeth is struggling to maintain a veneer of normalcy as he spins into abnormality.

That struggle is more expansively demonstrated by Kate Mulvany as Lady Macbeth; her Queen is so impressive it almost eclipses the title role. The part includes the most horrifying lines Shakespeare wrote; they are usually delivered as if the Queen-to-be has become a demon, badgering her husband into killing his boss.

I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

Mulvany instead shows us a grieving mother who has lost a child, is plagued by self-doubt, and is must have her consolation in social advancement. In the famous sleepwalking scene ("Out, damned spot!") she is a bonfire of guilt; she gives us not the customary static demonstration of an obsessive-compulsive disorder but a mind flinching in derangement. Evans discards the two worried witnesses from the scene and focuses all attention on this extraordinary performance. It is profoundly disturbing. She deserves cheering, but of course nobody can.

There's no joy to be found in this production; it's a ghost train wreck where you see people really getting hurt because someone did something bad. Like Picasso's Guernica or a Francis Bacon painting, it's a masterly work that few will love. But for those with the stomach for such prolonged torment, it is an encounter of rare intensity with arguably the greatest tragedy ever written.