Festival review: 2008: MacBeth

IN A SENSE, we are all familiar with images of death in recent wars across the Middle East; of people shot by snipers in narrow streets between white walls, or bayoneted to oblivion in small concrete rooms where sharp sunlight seeps through shuttered windows.

It is a shock to the system, though, to walk into the transformed Lowland Hall at Ingliston, and see that streetscape realised before our eyes, in the huge set for T R Warszawa’s massive contemporary response to the most widely-performed of all Shakespeare’s plays. The scale of the set – like a Beirut or Baghdad urban fortress on three floors – is so vast that in many ways, Gregor Jarzyna’s production ceases to be live theatre, and becomes a kind of IMAX installation experience with moments of heavily-miked live performance; if we want to see the actor’s faces with any clarity, we have to wait for the moments when their live close-up images are projected onto the walls of the set.

As an interpretation of the play, Jarzyna’s Macbeth makes two points with great clarity; that the world of hi-tech, modern warfare is still full of warlords like Macbeth, and that men who are praised for ruthless killing in war - even when, as in Jarzyna’s opening scene, it involves blasphemy and war crime - are unlikely to find it easy to stop once the battle is over.

Apart from that, its approach to the play – not helped by English surtitles that mix the original text with flat naturalistic banalities – is unsubtle, and sometimes crude. It reduces Lady Macbeth to a vulgar housewife, is oddly bereft (despite Shakespeare’s magnificent poetry on the subject, all cut here) of a wider sense of Macbeth’s impact on the territory he rules, makes very little of the colonising aspect of his final defeat, and never develops the strange presence on stage of a rabbit-like court jester, and a sinister magician.

The final impression is of a not-entirely-successful experiment in the idea of Shakespeare as spectacle, backed by resources so vast that some crucial decisions about meaning and focus have been avoided; yet if the end result has its limitations, the spectacle itself is breathtaking, transforming, and unforgettable.

Rating: ****

• Until 15 August. Today 7:30pm.