Three lunatic dollies jerk and prance in dub-step; they suck their fingers (or are they Raspberry Mivvis?), they entice and threaten, they are Sirens in flesh coloured body stockings. At the same time, body bags are lugged from one floor space to another, piled up in quotidian anonymity. We are in a club, an asylum, a battlefield. This is the Young Vic’s production of ‘Macbeth’, two helter-skelter hours of destructive energy, stretching beyond the picture frame and behind it, into a nightmare of corridors and identical, oppressive entrances and exits. It could have been the Bracknell Hilton, or nearby Broadmoor. The visual impact has an aural component, resonating inside the heads of the characters trapped in the scenario, the audience trapped in the auditorium. In the words of a contemporary poet, we are all ‘willing victims’.

More than you can say for Shakespeare’s majestic verse in the initial stages of Anna Maxwell Martin’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth. In an effort to lend, fragile nervous intensity to her presence, her utterances were jagged, truncated. It was well that all around her, the production was on fire with rhythm and mysterious depth, not least John Hefferman as Macbeth, a man who knew the intoxication of violence, but also the detailed anguish of introspection. This man lurched from Coriolanus to Hamlet and back again, with marvellous clarity of diction and swoop of emotions. The best that could be said of his wife is that she is caught up in something irresistibly bigger than herself, which is true, but not in an altogether good way. Her shimmering privacy simply didn’t create either threat or fusion. It’s not as if this actor lacks form: her performance of Esther Summerson was a triumph of repressed desire; her cameo in ‘The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies’ spoke brilliantly about the ugliness of media influence on an otherwise decent individual in a performance that was moving and unselfish.

The production itself, however, is a bleak, hypnotic delight. To call the movements and sound choreography is to reduce its integral importance. It was as endemic to the night’s ordeal as Nyman’s music is to Greenaway’s films. A total experience of body and mind together, the jangling contortions of being alive were framed with intensity. It could have been set anywhere- Scotland, Guantanamo, an office block, a penitentiary: it could have been a blasted heath. The witches were dark sisters all right, as they gyrated, hung their heads and froze. They had no hiding place, they could never check out, let alone leave. So much more than melodrama, this is what evil resembles; a kind of beauty, the bad fairies at the feast.

Speaking of the feast, this is the moment at which Maxwell Martin’s performance transformed her Lady Macbeth into a riveting case for treatment, beyond the reach of any SSRI or other mind altering drug. Macbeth’s colossal ineptitude when confronting Banquo’s ghost drove her into busy, garrulous subterfuge. She would have tidied away a corpse, given the chance: a perfected study of quiet desperation and partial understanding. What on earth was he up to? Could he have let the mask slip any more awkwardly? From then on, alienated and unheeded, she collapsed into herself, arrayed in a party dress that no one noticed.

The pace, dizzying from the outset, accelerates further. With the exception of losing ‘the wine of life’ speech after the discovery of Duncan’s body, I couldn’t fault the judicious excisions. This was a version of Shakespeare translated into eloquent gesture. The sprit was preserved, written large. No need to sprinkle names in particular praise; there was not a weak link in the cast. Banquo became a fabulous chorus/war commentator, Lady Macduff died with such poignant authenticity that we willed her husband’s revenge over and over. But revenge against whom? Against the slumped figure of Macbeth, an empty rucksack, a fallen statue? Against the shadow life of the witches, the flickering strobe lights of fate? Surely not against the deranged woman who began to imitate her arch tormentors, the ‘midnight hags’, and who staggered through the most convincing sleepwalking scene ever, Judi Dench and Francesca Annis notwithstanding.

The Directors, Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin have concocted a brew so toxic in this production that there may be no full recovery. They have plumbed the depths of inner guilt, inner ambition, inner envy, inner abandonment. They have made the business of war the agonised impotence of the Everyman.  And yet I could imagine taking my nine year old grand-daughter to this, in the knowledge that she would take what she could find form the experience. If Shakespeare cannot touch the least and the least likely of us it is the fault of interpreters and teachers, the fault of frightened reductionists. This production is brave enough to go for the real thing, and I would be surprised if it does not grow as it continues. I shall follow this precious phenomenon to Manchester at least. See you there.

By Peter Pegnall

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Macbeth directed by Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin, at the Young Vic until 23 Jan ’16