Daggers Drawn by Michael Billington

Dismal', 'A rough night'. Tim Albery's Macbeth is under attack. MICHAEL BILLINGTON rides to the rescue.

A MONTH ago Tim Albery's Nabucco provoked boos and counter-cheers at Covent Garden. But there was no such passion at Stratford-on-Avon, where his new Macbeth was received with polite applause. I, however, found it a compellingly intelligent production: one that shows the influence both of German theatre and the ENO of the eighties in its stylised lighting, emblematic grouping and inventive use of space.

Stewart Laing's design and Mimi Jordan Sherin's lighting set the tone: we see a gradual stripping away of layers of illusion as if we are slowly being led towards the barren consequences of tyranny. At first, it is set on raked forestage before black ramparts and a rook-adorned skycloth. This yields to the Macbeths' castle: a stark inhospitable place with beige prefab walls and strip lighting. Eventually this opens up to reveal a painted backcloth depicting the ravaged countryside that is the product of Macbeth's bleak absolutism.

... Roger Allam's finely spoken Macbeth is clearly haunted, in this respect, by the contrast between himself and Banquo. He murderously fondles Fleance, is wickedly mocked in the apparition scene by a succession of child Banquos, all - a brilliant touch - adorned with their father's moustache, and even turns up for the slaughter of Macduff's son as if to destroy what he cannot have.

... Albery's visual style and analytic brain, however, bind the show together. He doesn't get everything right: the England scene drags and, though one can see his point that with the elevation of Malcolm one emotional wreck succeeds another, it makes the end anti-climactic. But he has a great success with the Porter, whom Adrian Schiller plays superbly as a soused doorman, who finally plunges drunkenly into an on-stage pit; but then Albery, who directed Wallenstein, always was good with people called Schiller. Philip Quast's Banquo, Colum Convey's Macduff and Jan Chappell's Lady Macduff lend weight to a production that skillfully anatomises the emotional emptiness of tyranny: one that also confirms that the RSC is gradually moving away from the collective humanism of the Nunn years towards a more controversial neo-Expressionist aesthetic.