Summary 
A memorably visceral experience, this brutally realistic version of the Scottish tragedy features wailing bagpipes and dark wool-and-leather costuming, plus groundlings covered in a tarp except for their heads so they resemble a sea of frozen sinners' faces in hell. Creepy witches, astute textual insights, and an attractive and sexually urgent lead couple combine in a strong and gruesome realization that missteps only slightly - comical prophesies, a rushed pace - late in the production.
Design
Directed by Lucy Bailey. Designed by Katrina Lindsay. Compositions by Orlando Gough. Fights by Philip D'Orleans.
Cast
Janet Fullerlove (Weird Sister), Simone Kirby (Weird Sister/Lady Macduff), Karen Anderson (Weird Sister), James Clyde (Duncan), James McArdle (Malcolm), Craig Vye (Donalbain), Elliott Cowan (Macbeth), Christian Bradley (Banquo), Laura Rogers (Lady Macbeth), Frank Scantori (Porter).
Analysis
A visceral treatment of the brutal Scottish tragedy, with the couple of hundred groundlings at the outdoor Shakespeare's Globe concealed - except for their heads - by a black elastic tarpaulin, intended to resemble medieval paintings of floating faces frozen above Dante's Lake Cocytus or within the depths of hell. Before the production begins, the white-faced and tattooed Weird Sisters scuttle through the audience, sometimes unseen under the tarpaulin among the vulnerable groundlings, inciting squeals and shouts as they tickle, play with hair, hurl insults, taunt patrons, and laugh like maniacs. One creepy witch even pickpockets a young man's wallet.
Director Lucy Bailey begins the production in late-spring heat, fog beginning to roil onstage as a bell tolls and bagpipers emerge to play mournful notes from the middle galleries. Bloody shirtless soldiers rise from gaps among the groundlings like the battlefield dead and wounded - or the tormented in hell - bloody lash marks and gashes across their backs as if they have been whipped. When the witches gather, one of them a red-clad dwarf, they dance and cavort, invisible to the soldiers onstage, but the bleeding soldiers spasm - "when shall we three meet again?" - with the incantations.
Bailey's 1.2, like her overall production, is relentlessly dark, smoky, bloody and deadly serious in tone, the costumes all leather and heavy wool, the Scottish characters grubby and tough. The crowned Duncan, a youngish King with a gash across his cheek, orders his soldiers to pull a wounded man to the stage - "get him surgeons!" - to testify as to Macbeth's heroic exploits on the battlefield. The captive traitor Cawdor is dragged onstage and driven to his knees as he is chained to a column, and the witches return as Duncan leads his soldiers in victory chants, their swords crossed like crucifixes. After Cawdor's tongue is cut out and apparently tossed among the groundlings, Bailey cuts to 1.3, with the Weird Sisters approaching Macbeth and Banquo but concealed behind a circular scrim suspended from a metal circle high above the stage. The men panic when confronted by the eerie Sisters - "so foul and fair a day" - cringing from the repeated chant of "all hail," and when the witches disappear under the groundlings' tarpaulin after the prophesies, Elliott Cowan's Macbeth covers his head, kneels and crosses himself.
Cowan's Macbeth is lean and sinewy, a convincingly thuggish Scottish warrior with an eye toward rapid advancement, and Laura Rogers presents his wispy waif Lady as a diminutive opportunist who quickly gets in over her head. The two make an attractive couple with super-charged sexual chemistry: as she reads his letter 1.5 - "my dearest partner of greatness" - she seems genuinely proud, then determined - "unsex me here!" she cries as the witches creep onstage - then suddenly sexually aroused, writhing and moaning on her back as a messenger arrives; and when Cowan's lusty Macbeth approaches her from behind, he wraps her in the filmy curtain and fairly mauls her, and soon they are both on their knees in groping passion, and he rips his shirt off and rolls atop her in an uncomfortably lengthy love scene that brings ripples of amused laughter from the audience. Cowan's Macbeth and Rogers' Lady are together immediate, impetuous and impulsive, and their sexual energy borders on violence, so the resulting ambition to not only unseat but to murder a disconcertingly young King seems plausible. This Macbeth and Lady, however, seem to react to fatal vision rather than succumb to fatal flaws, and they become swept up in events and overwhelmed rather than render themselves doomed or damned, so the production seems less human tragedy than gritty crime drama.
Bailey not only uses the performance space to outstanding effect - between the stage action, the groundlings, and the bagpipers in the galleries, there is much to see, despite minimal scenic design and lack of lighting - but she also provides considerable character insight. The usually quite minor Fleance, for example, is broadened here, a blond-haired sire of future Kings of Scotland - especially galling to the childless Macbeths - who sings a Scottish hymn for Duncan's celebration in 1.6, then plays a 2.1 game with his father in which he disarms Banquo and tackles and pretends - quite ironically - to slit Macbeth's throat. Later, in 3.1, the boy wonder Fleance gazes intently upon Macbeth's throne as if somehow aware it will one day be his, and when Cowan's Macbeth playfully crowns him with the royal coronet as he speaks to his father - "fail not my feast" - Fleance nearly escapes with the crown, only returning when Macbeth ("ah! ah! ah!") shouts after him. Bailey also imbues the 2.3 Porter with a languidly paced comedic scene, as the obese and half-naked man clutches himself - "remember the Porter!" - then urinates upstage into a metal bucket, wiggling his bottom at the groundlings. He fakes spraying the crowd with the contents of his bucket several times - he eventually douses several unlucky groundlings - and breaks wind and masturbates before exiting as the alarum sounds. Even Macduff plays to the crowd, gesturing 4.3 to a group of girls' school students in the gallery nearest him when he refers to Malcolm's supposedly insatiable lust.
But the focus of the production is Cowan's Macbeth, and during 1.7 he wrings his hands in trepidation downstage - "'tis best 't were done quickly" - as Rogers' Lady, lovely in a silver gown and head dress, stares daggers at him upstage like a witch from Duncan's side. When she confronts him in private, the short-haired Lady punches at him until he grabs her by the arms, then she insults and laughs at him - "then you were a man" - and grabs his crotch until he muscles her down to the stage and nearly rapes her. Cowan's Macbeth falters at the knife proffered by one of the witches - "a dagger of the minnnnd" - that she then slits her palm with, but he regains his resolve upon the emergence of Rogers' Lady. When he staggers back onstage, his hands bloody from having killed the King - "amen stuck in my throat" - she chides him ("infirm of purpose") from the opposite side of the stage, and he kicks the offending instruments to her with a disgusted shove from his foot, the knives clattering across the stage. Macbeth emerges from upstage moments later - the witches watching and the stage crowded with thanes - first with the bloody body of Duncan wrapped in sheets, then dragging a stained tarpaulin upon which lie the bodies of the guards he has slain. Typical for Bailey's gruesome vision, the witches carve a hunk of flesh from a supposed murderer's corpse as the scene concludes. The sudden schism between the two lovers is evident in 3.1, when Cowan's newly crowned Macbeth - manic and seething, twirling his crown and tapping his foot - kisses the Lady's palm, then embraces her and takes her face in his hands, but ultimately dismisses her. Rogers' Lady, already on the point of hysteria in her black dress and gray scarf, is watched closely by the voyeuristic witches, as her husband - "full of scorpions is my mind" - begins to terrify her.
Christian Bradley's long-haired warrior Banquo, a crucifix visible around his neck - "thou has it now" - defends Fleance valiantly from the rush of murderers 3.3, pushing his son up one of the ladders then pulling a pursuer back down to the stage before his throat is slit. In a particularly creepy touch, the witches emerge after the murderers depart to haul Banquo's corpse to a stage-trap pit as if dragging him down into hell, as a gong echoes to mark intermission. Bailey resumes with her production's most excitingly effective scene, the 3.4 banquet, with a wide and heaping platter of meats and fruits downstage center for the guests of the Macbeths. Cowan is at his charming best, sitting in a lady's lap, joking, and even juggling to distract the party-goers from the arrival of the bloodied murderers. (When Cowan inadvertently drops his crown into the feast platter, he retrieves it and licks it clean, in an admirably quick-witted ad lib.) The scene explodes moments later in a memorably chilling visual, as Banquo's bare bloodied arm thrusts upward from a trap beneath the feast platter to point an accusatory finger at Cowan's Macbeth, who recoils in shock as the crowd erupts in gasps and shouts. After Lady Macbeth tries to rally him - "are you a man?" - and pointedly fails, Macbeth attempts to cover his bizarre reaction to nothing ("I do forget!") by laughing it off, then watches Rogers' Lady dig through the piles of meat and fruit with her bare hands but of course come up empty. Moments later - "what sights, my lord" - Bradley's bloody Banquo erupts again from the platter, and Cowan's Macbeth spits his drink and hurls his crown at the apparition. As Banquo crawls out of the pit and stands zombie-like, grasping for the King with both arms extended, Macbeth staggers backward and sprawls over a chair.
Bailey's production, fiery and evocative to this point, as well as impressively smart and inventive, stumbles a bit in scenes of latter acts. The 3.5 prophesies, for example, draw unintentional laughter, as the witches emerge amid smoke from traps to torture the Porter and receive ingredients for their evil cauldron - "eye of newt" - from arms and hands that slither like snakes from traps. The grotesque witches - one actually licks a bloody hand clean - descend upon Cowan's intensely curious Macbeth, seizing him, tearing his shirt loose, and dumping him into a trap feet first. As Banquo's ghost emerges upstage as a witness, the visions pass before Cowan's Macbeth with crude oddity, crass humor, or just plain silliness: a witch pulls a newborn baby from a trap between her legs, umbilical spray dousing the groundlings' faces; a squatting baby doll is voiced in high-pitch by another witch, who then flips off the audience; then the Porter with wagging tongue taunts leads both Macduff and Fleance from the stage. The scene, head-scratchingly ineffective, segues into the 4.2 assault on the Lady Macduff home, a better-realized if more gruesome scene, with the Macduff women and children confronted by five murderers amid a wail of bagpipes. Their lifeless bodies are dumped unceremoniously into stage traps by the assassins.
The fifth act fares better than the fourth, but is still not up to the jaw-dropping quality of the production's first two hours. Bailey cuts 5.1 to a doctor and a nurse watching Rogers' nearly-babbling Lady as she shuffles onstage, holding a candle and looking pale. As she mimes the washing of her hands, she drops to her knees in despair, her finest moments of the production. When she has died the witches drag her dead body to the stage, concealed within a bloody canvas sheet. Cowan's Macbeth, momentarily rattled, finally responds in a bit of fury - "she should have died hereafter" - before stabbing himself in the belly. Oddity continues as the torch-bearing Porter assists the witches in dragging Lady Macbeth right back off the stage, and after Cowan's fiercely defiant Macbeth defeats Young Siward, he shoves the corpse into a stage trap, then to re-arm himself accepts a sword somehow offered by Siward himself from below the stage. With his army - the Porter and the three witches in chainmail - Cowan's Macbeth battles away to the noise from rattling drums and quick percussive beats, even defeating and killing each of the witches, only to watch them rise again. The production concludes with Macduff's confrontation of Macbeth amid the sudden blare from patriotic bagpipes, and while their brief combat - "lay on, Macduff" - is initially anti-climactic, with Macduff pursuing the tyrant from the stage, the ending satisfies. Cowan's stripped body suddenly bursts from a rent in the black tarpaulin as if Macbeth is trying to crawl out of hell, but the witches take hold of him and drag him back into the darkness.