Macbeth 'The Show' is billed as immersive event theatre, taking Shakespeare's tragedy into vast warehouses to refresh its relevance for contemporary audiences.
After stop-offs in Liverpool and Edinburgh it arrives in a Docklands shed next to a gigantic Decathalon. You walk through a blasted landscape of burning cars and rubble to Christopher Shutt's soundscape of buzzing helicopters, to get to your bum-numbingly tightly-packed seat.
Huge metal doors clang shut to seal us in, and soldiers in contemporary fatigues stand guard, so far so resonant, but thereafter director Simon Godwin delivers a fairly standard if unimaginative modern staging on three sides of Frankie Bradshaw's stripped back dual level set.
But Macbeth is as much about the psychology of power and bloodletting as about war, and the draw in Emily Burns' tight adaptation is the virtuoso central performances from Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma.
Both speak Shakespeare's verse with absolute clarity, and compellingly pull you into the mental torment of guilt and horror that drives this couple apart.
But it's a slow start, and lacking in paranormal weirdness as the witches appear to Fiennes's stiff legged, almost bumbling Macbeth as three young Gen Z types in charity shop chic, whose manipulative aim seems to be to effect regime change upon a gang of awful old men.
Dramatically the play has a feverish forward propulsion as Macbeth's delusions are punctured and he hurtles towards his face-off with Macduff. But Godwin chooses to keep things evenly plodding along, punctuated by the odd flashbang and Fiennes' beautifully controlled soliloquies which wing from morbid, roguish humour to skin clawing terror, and existential anguish.
His exclamation 'at least we'll die with harness on our back' offers an echo of the courageous hero Macbeth once was.
Meanwhile Varma clad in sexy green silk is first excited by the prospect of murder and advancement, then visibly vulnerable at her husband's withdrawal, before flinching away from this clutching caresses in horrified disgust.
Ben Turner's emotionally charged Macduff is also a stand out, as is Jonathan Case as the Macbeths' steward who has to paraphrase 'known what he should not'. His quivering terror at the brutalities he witnesses is a great conduit for our own revulsion, and a brilliant evocation of what it is to live under an authoritarian regime.
Macbeth runs at Dock X, Canada Water until March 10.
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