Macbeth with Sam Heughan and Lia Williams at RSC’s The Other Place – review

Anyone who saw director Daniel Raggett’s production of Edward II in the Swan Theatre earlier this year will not be surprised to learn that his version of Macbeth is, in a word, horrible. But not necessarily in an all-bad way.

Like the Marlowe, it’s grim, dimly lit and bloodily visceral, a kind of live-action Tarantino interpretation of Shakespeare’s tale of vaulting ambition and reckless careerism. Unlike the Marlowe, it’s been updated to modern-day Glasgow, where gang bosses exercise control by means of baseball bats and flick-knives, and underlings scurry about in tight T-shirts and leather jackets.

The entire action – apart from one jarringly anomalous scene – takes place in a dive of a pub, brilliantly recreated by designer Anna Reid and complete with strip lights, overhead fans and a working bar in one corner of the reconfigured, in-the-round Other Place. One can almost feel the carpets sticking to the actors’ feet. It’s clearly Macbeth’s home territory, although he himself owes allegiance to “King Duncan”, the ultimate chief of this Govan turf.

Some of this concept works fine – the rivalries and shifting power among the “thanes” transfer well enough to tribal warfare on the streets of Scottish gangland. But there are also some fundamental problems that render the enterprise not only fatally flawed but also ghoulishly unpleasant. Duncan, for instance, is described as “a most sainted king”, and yet here he is nothing more than a vicious hardman with no “virtues” to be mourned or missed. Similarly, Macbeth is presented by Shakespeare as a valiant warrior undone by his own uncertainties, but in this production, it is he who personally oversees the murder of Macduff’s family, even leading his enemy’s young son off-stage with a bloodied hammer in his hand to dispatch the lethal blow himself.

The intimate setting accentuates the over-the-top nastiness of the many graphic episodes, while Raggett’s liberally mangled text – he reworks lines, transposes famous scenes, chops things about at will – is also a mixture of highs and lows. This is certainly not one for the faint-hearted or the purists.

What it might be is one for fans of Sam Heughan, whose screen fame is undoubtedly a big draw for the RSC. His Macbeth is muscular and angry, and he takes on a much more proactive role in his own destiny than is often conveyed. If this sidelines Lia Williams’s more fragile Lady M, it does at least have the benefit of making him ultimately responsible for all the bad things that happen to him.

Around him, Nicholas Karimi’s Banquo is quietly menacing, John McLarnon makes a fine RSC debut in the expanded role of Ross, and Michael Abubakar neatly conflates several smaller parts into the role of the Porter, only without that annoying “comedy” bit about the knocking at the door.

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.