This is the last significant opening of the theatrical year – and also arguably the biggest. David Tennant, a fine stage actor and notable Shakespearean performer, whose Hamlet for the RSC remains one of the finest pieces of theatre I have ever seen, assumes the role of the murderous Macbeth in the beguiling studio intimacy of the 251-seat Donmar Warehouse.
Yet this intimacy is oddly wasted by the production’s decision to provide the audience with headphones in order to experience the binaural sound design.
It’s easy to understand the thinking behind director Max Webster’s decision: by getting us up close and personal with the actors’ voices like this, it is as though we are being allowed unfettered access into the characters’ darkest and most private thoughts, above all in the soliloquies.
Webster’s vision of the play is of a psychological drama, in which wars and kingdoms are of decidedly lesser importance than the fevered recesses of the Macbeths’ minds.
However I must confess that I swiftly started to take the headphones off for extended periods, so as to restore that all-important connection between voice and corporeal actor.
What remained missing, though, was that electric sense of audience members having a shared experience and registering each other’s reactions. Instead, we remain forlornly isolated in our own private sound world bubble.
Another big concept of Webster’s is to do away with the witches as a physical presence. We hear their words but don’t see them; are Macbeth and Banquo perhaps hallucinating after the bloody battle?
This isn’t an idea that stands up well in terms of the play’s narrative logic and is another example of the production, with its bare white playing square, prioritising style over substance. All the cast – excepting Cush Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth in a flowing white dress – sport tops in shades of black and grey and very on-trend kilt-style black skirts.
With his tight long-sleeved t-shirt and headband restraining well-styled hair, Tennant seems far more like a Premiership footballer than a valiant warrior.
The binaural technology, which reverts too often to portentous bird sounds and atmospheric music from Gaelic singer Kathleen MacInnes, at last comes into its own for the fractured flurry of short scenes in Act Five.
If the Macbeths’ marriage never quite manages to convince us of its closeness and complicity, the portrayal of its disintegration is superbly done. Jumbo is powerful and compelling as she traces the final stages of Lady Macbeth’s loneliness and escalating mental anguish.
Tennant is magnificent in the closing stages, displaying all the existential weariness – not to mention exquisite verse speaking – of a man who knows that the game is up and that all the murderous machinations were for nothing.
This is a tantalising, infuriating reminder of the considerable talent the production too often wastes.
To 10 February (020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com)