Macbeth

Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Rufus Norris

Olivier, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1, until 23 June; then touring from September (nationaltheatre.org.uk) Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)

In the best productions, this most thrillerish of Shakespeare’s tragedies can feel like “a ferocious ride straight to hell, pausing only for some of the most haunting and desolate soliloquies in the canon”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. What Macbeth should never feel like – as it does here – is turgid, somnolent and baffling. Rufus Norris’s flop production is supposedly set in modern Britain “after a civil war”, said Ann Treneman in The Times. This is a “post-brexit nightmare. Bleak. Dystopian. Violent. Think zombies but Scottish, and Mad Max dressed in charity shop camouflage.” But the “gloom doomery” is so overwhelming you end up not caring, and willing it all to end.

Setting Macbeth in some “lawless, fallen future” makes a nonsense of the play, said Matt Trueman in Variety. Macbeth is a craven social climber who kills his way to power: if you take all social order away, he is left “with nothing to climb and no compunctions to stop him”. Norris “strips out the play’s stakes, obstacles and motivation” – and to make matters worse, he has taken a play that is best compressed into a fleet, taut, psychological drama and given it an “operatically overblown” staging. Rory Kinnear struggles as a gruff, nutcase Macbeth who feels like he’s “meandering in a maelstrom”. Anne-marie Duff as Lady Macbeth “all but goes missing”: a wan figure who ends up chattering to herself.

What’s so dismaying is the “lack of coherence”, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. “Interesting ideas flash by and then are lost in a welter of gory special effects. Speeches are shouted from poles or platforms” to no great effect. This “misjudged mess” is a horror show in all the wrong ways. “Is this a dud which I see before me?” I’m afraid so, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. The evening begins and ends with a gruesome simulated decapitation. “I’m not saying Norris’s head should roll” as NT boss – but “dark and bloody thoughts may seize those, like me, left mightily unmoved and unharrowed.”