The modern setting is wisely underplayed, David Paisley's titular warrior demonstrates the symptoms of what we might call PTSD now but the core of the play, and this production, is the sheer intensity of the relationship between the Macbeths. Their first reunion is played with an agonising potency, sexual hunger bleeding into something animalistic, especially once they confirm the plans to realise the ambitions that they both share - there's no mistaking the gleam in Lady M's eye here as she's given the crown for safekeeping upon Duncan's visit.
Equally, there's no doubting the role of the supernatural here. The witches combine a mishmash of influences - steampunk goggles, singer/songwriter musical interludes (I think I heard a bit of Kyla La Grange in there), omnipresent looming - to become something genuinely disturbing, their second-act incantations brought chills to the spine. And it is into this all-too-real occult that Cornelia Baumann's Lady Macbeth taps quite astoundingly with her 'unsex me here' speech, a reading of devastating power.
McGregor's adaptation finds more of these moments - the Macduffs' murder is another powerful strike - but it doesn't quite always maintain the same level of fresh invention. It is only in the final moments that all its elements coalesce into something wonderful, in the way that made Anna Karenina sing, as the swells of Samuel Morgan-Grahame and Gemma Salter's music give rise to a gorgeous dance of the dead, capped off with an enormous emotional sucker-punch.
