After reimagining 'The Odyssey' as an action-hero movie in 2016, the choreographer Mark Bruce has turned his attention to Shakespeare. So here we have Macbeth, the horror film – with lashings of violence and a soundtrack that dips from Arvo Pärt to the dissonant far shores of Penderecki and Sonic Youth. As lightning flashes over Phil Eddolls’s dark, spare set, the witches shriek and flail to Slaapkamers Met Slagroom – then appear before Jonathan Goddard’s Macbeth looking like zombified Valley Girls, producing silver-skinned Chuckie dolls from their outsize handbags to demonstrate their prophesy for Banquo. Knives flash, heads end up on spikes, King Duncan’s body raises its arms as it’s burned on its funeral pyre, the witches set about Macbeth’s head with hammers. There is a lot of screaming.
If you’re not sure what happens in Macbeth, it may be best to read a synopsis first. Bruce has snipped and trimmed the play to a run time of under two hours with an interval, but is still tightly tied in to its plot – too tightly, it feels at times, as the action on stage can get clunky. Sometimes too he struggles to convey an essential element through choreography – Lady Macbeth’s 'unsex me here' moment, for instance, is not best represented by Eleanor Duval pulling wanly at the front of her dress.
However, something interesting emerges from this Macbeth stripped of words, possibly helped by the mournfully elegiac nature of much of the Pärt music that dominates the score – as the characters dance their solos, you realise how much grief there is in this play, and how many are forged in its fires. It’s a weighty counterbalance to some of the over-the-top horror hokum that crops up elsewhere in the show (stuffed ravens, killer clown masks etc).
The nine dancers work hard (some juggling multiple roles) and Bruce’s muscular choreography fills Wiltons' stage – there are filmic sweeps of stylised fighting, and some nice touches of Scottish dancing woven through solo and ensemble pieces. Goddard works up a pleasingly malign chemistry with Duval, and although he doesn’t get many chances to really let fly with his dancing, when he does it’s like seeing the release of a coiled spring. It’s not the most piercing interpretation of Macbeth, but there are definite wicked pleasures.