MACBETH. To 22 February.

Sheffield

MACBETH
by William Shakespeare adapted by James Phillips

Crucible Studio Theatre To 22 February 2003
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Mat 6,13,20 February 2pm 15,22 February 3pm
BSL Signed 11 February
Runs 1hr 20min No interval

TICKETS: 0114 249 6000
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 February

A stripped-down production misses aspects but provides a telling focus.Ramshackle old doors surround the studio. Tiny model houses are sometimes warm with interior lights; or else stand coldly dark. One door, in a mobile frame, stands alone. Three women, looking like middle-class Victorian Misses, sit around. The Weird Sisters' incantation from Macbeth comes with weird innocence from their mouths: as if children playing in the attic, and simultaneously exploring dusty imaginative reaches, had found an evil treasure-chest.

Military-looking Macbeth steps through the door, as though from the safe adult world downstairs, checking on the children. He speaks with almost patronising confidence, only to find their unexpected words seduce him into new thoughts. This ambiguous mix is present in Lucy Whybrow's quiet-spoken Lady Macbeth - long white dress matching light hair, her fair, lustrous face continuously smiling: the innocent flower with the serpent nagging beneath the playful eyes.

The Macbeths' planning is near hypnotic: alone, Finbar Lynch shoots up a gear, seeming to come out of a trance for the moral complexity of his soliloquy 'If it were done '. Later, he finds no room for reflection, grasping roughly at the imagined dagger, leaping instantly across thoughts.

The door wheels round the stage, placing us filmically outside in a cramped space when Macbeth talks to the murderers, the symbolically-presented thanes' banquet going on behind. And the childhood theme's emphasised by the high-chair throne, always remote, never quite securely focussed. From here Macbeth ignores his wife as she leans on his knee. Here she sits, cut off from him and with her back to us us, half-lit, before committing stylised suicide (her scarf tied to the chair-back) while Macbeth, in audience close-up, fights his last act fight solo, dying as the three sisters assemble in seeming innocence over his dead body.

James Phillips misses the royal, public dimension. Duncan's hardly established as a character, making his murder less frightful. It's primarily a production for people who can 'read in' the background. But it offers some fine acting, bringing powerful images of the innocent-seeming and the sinister co-existing, of actions spiralling out of conscious control.

Macbeth: Finbar Lynch
Lady Macbeth: Lucy Whybrow
Macduff/Porter/Duncan: Ashley Miller
Banquo/Lady Macduff: Rebecca Johnson

Director: James Phillips
Designer: David Farley
Lighting: Guy Hoare
Sound: Neil Alexander
Costume: Sarah Cant
Fight director: Richard Ryan

2003-02-06 15:30:40