James McAvoy's Macbeth skids across the stage on his knees and chucks up violently with his head down the loo before he launches into the “If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well/It were done quickly” soliloquy.
You could say that he is always the man of action even when laying bare – in incisive and pungently Scots-accented verse-speaking – the knotty nuances of his innermost fears and torments. And the actor makes that seem perfectly natural in a gripping, no-holds-barred performance that will impress fans of his work in the X-Men movies and unlock for youthful newcomers to Shakespeare some of the poetic and psychological riches of the play.
Jamie Lloyd's production is set in the near future in a dystopian, separatist version of Scotland that is not calculated to gladden the heart of Alex Salmond. Our hero is initially a kind of Mad Mac figure in a world that, ravaged by bankruptcy and climate change, seems to have reverted to a bloody primitive tribalism.
This show launches the new Trafalgar Transformed season for which the main Studio 1 space has been reconfigured by Soutra Gilmour. In-yer-face immediacy has never hitherto been the strength of this venue. But in addition to pushing the stage out over the first few rows, her spectacularly grungy in-the-round design for Macbeth places some seventy seats onstage (pac-a-mac ponchos recommended) and with all the frazzled lightning and crash-bang-wallop effects, it's as though you are being pulled into a nation's nervous system as it goes haywire.
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