MARK TURNER wallows in the virtuosity of Swansea Jazz Festival openers, Simon Spillett and Pete Long

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 is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead

GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from

GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience

GORDON PARSONS advises you to get up to speed on obscure ancient ceremonies to grasp this interpretation of a late Shakespearean tragi-comedy