Photo: Marc Brenner
It was a revealing theater week. Shrouded in the supernatural. Powered by groundbreaking technology. Max Webster's gimlet production of Macbeth - the third major staging of the play this year - thrillingly combines the superb acting of David Tennant and Cush Jumbo with the groundbreaking binaural sound of Gareth Fry. You listen to the piece through headphones. Which do not turn out to be distracting, but rather make it possible. They don't shut you down, they connect you. They are the auditory equivalent of a proscenium arch, which draws attention.
In your ears, in your head, are the urgent thoughts of Macbeth, the spitting whispers of the strange - here 'wayward' - sisters, the cawing and chattering of crows, the snapping of a broken neck, the fearless lamentations of Alasdair Macrae's Scottish people.
You hear but not see everything - those Waywards are clouds of smoke - which perfectly reflects how the piece swims in and out of illusion and baffles the senses. Rosanna Vize's design is entirely monochrome, with musicians - violin, accordion, Gaelic singer - arranged as witnesses behind glass. Costumes tell the stories of the characters: sober kilts, semi-structured jackets, military without exactly being uniforms; Macbeth in a skimpy gray T-shirt, neater; Duncan (unusually memorably present by Benny Young) stately in robes; Lady Macbeth beautifully misleading in white.
Everything overshadows, nothing detracts from the central performances, with Jatinder Singh Randhawa's booming Porter, who doubles as Seytan (with a good play on the sharp enunciation), adding a note of depth. Tennant's grace makes it easy to see the contours of the action: he never fusses. Yet there is nothing broad about his interpretation. His determination is made up of small, unforced moments. The pause in which he says that the king will leave his castle the next day - "as he intends" - is entirely appropriate; no more than a hesitation that raises a cloud, without revealing its meaning. As he becomes more purposeful, his eyes seem to change shape, narrowing into cunning.
The story continues
The disappearance of a ship so big it looks like the Cutty Sark broke into the stalls is worth the ticket price alone
Jumbo's Lady Macbeth is bursting with radiant energy: she goes for the big job because she just can't resist driving on. Yet doubt always shadows her: when she claims that "the sleeping and the dead are but images," she is not rebuking her husband's fear, but challenging her own. Both make the verse sound surprisingly current, not by adding anything, but by seeming to strip: by focusing on what is really there. Or is it?
The celebration of Stranger Things: The First Shadow makes most technologically inventive productions look like snacks. The writing is shaky, but oh the dash, the drive, the grip of the staging.
Creating a standalone piece from the creepy Netflix series was Stephen's idea ( The crown) Daldry: he co-directs with Justin Martin. Kate Trefry is credited with the script, which is based on an original story by the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne, following the backstory of a new monster and the lives of the Winona Ryder character (a very convincing Isabella Pappas) and friends as teenagers from the fifties are depicted. . You can follow the thread without doing any homework, but there's something to be gained from sharing in the thrill of recognition that runs through fans as those telltale bloodlines (even more sinister because there's no warm current) flow across a face.
Clump describes real-life traumas: an older generation is haunted by bad dreams from the war. Clump makes a weak plea for love as saving grace. The awkwardness doesn't really matter. The real story takes place elsewhere. In the merging of dimensions, from one mode to another: video to flesh, substance to clouds of smoke, schoolboys to monstrous other selves. As the world turns upside down, and becomes honestly polluting, technology is not just a tool or an add-on; it is part of the subject, our other dimension.
The opening moments - with the disappearance of a ship so large it seems as if the Cutty Sark broke into the stalls - are worth the ticket price alone. Like some quick horrors, a look from the psychokinetically gifted turns a rat into a pink blur and fills empty jars with spiders. Lights flash around the venue and the sound of breaking glass crackles behind spectators; on stage, clouds of smoke swim in multi-tentacular changing shapes.
There are all-encompassing sensations from Jon Clark (lighting), Paul Arditti (sound), 59 Productions (video and visual effects) and Miriam Buether, whose sets - a shadowy attic with beams, a white-tiled laboratory, a perfect row of school lockers - look extremely solid yet spinning in seconds to transform a scene. There is also a human center. Daldry took youth acting to a new level Billy Elliot, and ups the game here too. As the villain-hero, Louis McCartney makes a great stage debut, clenched and swaying, completely natural and completely different from usual. There may come a day (although it's hard to imagine it now) when these whooshing effects no longer startle, but McCartney's acting will make the characters seem fresh.
A character in it Ulster-American undoubtedly speaks for many when he says that the only thing he wants to read from a theater critic is a suicide note. Nevertheless: on we go. One of the satisfactions of David Ireland's plays is that their machine-gun provocations are so widespread that virtually everyone ends up in the fire. This is not as strikingly original as the peerless Cyprus Avenue (2016), where a man thought his granddaughter was an incarnation of Gerry Adams, but it thrives on the playwright's peculiar blend of physical brutality and intellectual agility.
Jeremy Herrin's fast, clear production is characterized by all-round strong performances from a star cast. Woody Harrelson is hilariously comic as a vain Hollywood actor who comes to grace a young woman's play about Northern Ireland ("What is Ulster?"), slipping into horse position and handstand. Andy Serkis, gulping down glasses of red wine as big as a baby's face, brims with precarious right thinking like a nervous director. Louisa Harland (from TV's Derry girls, which also starred David Ireland) plays the dramatist with unflappable acuity: she is the smartest character - and, hurray, acquires views that will not easily escape the notice of any liberal audience. Ireland's determined outrageousness - on misogyny he has a rape joke - may detract from his sharper arguments. Yet he makes me laugh nonchalantly again and again: "What if," one man asks, "Jesus puts a gun to your head...?"
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Macbeth is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 until February 10
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Stranger things is at the Phoenix Theatre, London WC2 until June 30
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Ulster-American is at Riverside Studios, London W6 until January 27
