Macbeth review: Wary, thoughtful, skittish… Ralph Fiennes even has comic touches in this new production of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, writes PATRICK MARMION

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Some Macbeths come out swinging, like big-hitting Alpha males.

Not Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes in this fascinating new production of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, which opened in Liverpool last night, ahead of dates next year in Edinburgh, London – and Washington DC.

Playing a knuckle-dragging primate would be way too obvious for Fiennes’s edgy and tortured, thinker soldier. Damn near bashful at first, he can scarcely bring himself to meet the eyes of Duncan, King of Scotland, whose job he secretly covets.

But he is egged on, in this modern dress version of the supernatural tragedy, by three refugee witches – and a svelte and suave Indira Varma, as his ravening wife.

Though we first see Fiennes’s titled warlord in battle fatigues, he’s never really comfortable with power play. He’s a cagey outsider who, try as he might, never really belongs. It’s a clever way of couching his guilty conscience when, after famously ‘murdering sleep’ – by killing the king in his own home – he finds himself trapped in a hideous waking nightmare.

Wary, thoughtful and skittish, Fiennes keeps you wondering what he and his ‘heat oppressed brain’ will do next, in a nervy, tense performance that sees him for ever glancing over his shoulder (Pictured: Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma)

The witches who tempt Macbeth look like a trio of homeless, vegan students, bored by the business of luring folk into damnation with incantations and sorcery. But they have a nice Exorcist-style moment when they turn the Thane’s hitmen into puppets

Wary, thoughtful and skittish, Fiennes keeps you wondering what he and his ‘heat oppressed brain’ will do next, in a nervy, tense performance that sees him for ever glancing over his shoulder. Could he sometimes have used a bit more fizz and energy? Maybe. But he mainlines instead on an enervating sense of dread from which there’s no return.

There are, moreover, a few comic touches to lighten the mood; and Fiennes enjoys an intimate, almost sweet relationship with Varma as his glamour-puss wife. She finds herself unexpectedly aroused by the prospect of becoming queen… and is shocked to discover what she’ll do to ensure it. When she finally achieves that end, she dons a sensational sleek, green gown for her investiture.

But the sleep-deprived mental breakdown that follows doesn’t disappoint either: mixing panic and hallucination with shrieking despair. The witches who tempt Macbeth look like a trio of homeless, vegan students, bored by the business of luring folk into damnation with incantations and sorcery. But they have a nice Exorcist-style moment when they turn the Thane’s hitmen into puppets.

Elsewhere, Simon Godwin’s production of the text, abridged by Emily Burns, is more solid and lucid than inventive or startling.

Elsewhere, Simon Godwin’s production of the text, abridged by Emily Burns, is more solid and lucid than inventive or startling

The warehouse venue, astride a retail park in Fairfield, has the audience entering through a smoking battlefield with burnt trees and a barbecued car. The stage itself is a concrete bunker, doubling as a designer castle.

Although the walls weep blood and ghosts appear behind plate glass doors, there’s little other visual interest. The fact that the soldiers liberating the Scots at Dunsinane wear UN peacekeeping uniforms also speaks volumes of the production’s modest political ambitions. But it’s probably a wise precaution – English troops emancipating the Scots might’ve stuck in their craw when the show moves north of the border.

Vladimir Putin would surely dismiss the mean little banqueting table around which the Macbeths convene for the ghoulish central scene, haunted by Banquo’s ghost. But as a megalomaniac gangster tyrant, Fiennes’s troubled misfit is much more interesting than his hellbound Russian counterpart.

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