Review: Macbeth ****

There’s some impressive multi-tasking going on in this outdoor production of Macbeth, not least by the three witches, who not only point our protagonist toward his fate, but also guide the audience throughout, often by the hand, as they lead from one intriguing setting to the next, through woodland to clearings and castle gates, past huge fiery torches, to the sound of insistent drumming, deed and thought darkening as the evening darkens.

The audience too has more than one role; Charlotte Bennett’s staging of the Scottish play, set as intended in 1042, inveigles watchers as players, walking shadows, some members sitting at the banquet that is laid out in Ripley’s walled garden, looking up at Banquo’s bloody ghost striding across the table tops towards his assassin.

Matt Cross’s Macbeth is wide-eyed, unthinking yet knowing, mechanical in his pursuit of unsustainable ambition. Steered by the weird sisters and the quiet but impressively cold Lady Macbeth (Laura Rees), he shows us the grim acceleration of paranoid murderous psychosis.

This production boasts a large cast of talented young actors, and they, together with thoughtful staging and the astonishingly atmospheric setting of Ripley Castle, must be thanked for creating an exciting and intimate Macbeth, moving in more ways than one and deeply involving to all, including the many teens who made up the audience the night I saw it.

My 13-year-old son’s first taste of Shakespeare in the flesh, he emerged inspired, blown away, entranced. We had no rain, but it would not have mattered if we had. The travelling outdoor castle woodland setting seems so suited to Macbeth that, now, I can’t imagine it done any other way.

To July 10.