ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Macbeth
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
UNDENIABLY, there's an operatic quality to all of the Bard’s tragedies. The individual actor playing the protagonist controls the impact of the play and Christopher Eccleston's Macbeth is no noble Scottish captain but rather an unimaginative, bullet-headed northern squaddie.
That is, until he meets the weird sisters who, in Polly Findlay’s production, are three seemingly delightful little girls playing “innocently” with their dolls.
With the possibility of seizing the crown embedded into his mind, Macbeth can’t wait for the wheelchair-bound, geriatric Duncan to leave the scene naturally. Speedily, he gets on with seeing the old man off.
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
GORDON PARSONS joins a standing ovation for a brilliant production that fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead's music



