David Tennant has played numerous villains on screen, but has steered relatively clear of them on stage, with his sundry Shakespeare credits not including any of the Bard’s many juicy villain roles… until now.
In a production that seems all but guaranteed to sell out months in advance, the tiny Donmar Warehouse continues its long-running tradition of booking massive actors for intimate Shakespeare productions – think Derek Jacobi in ‘Lear’ or Tom Hiddleston in ‘Coriolanus’ – by casting Tennant as ‘Macbeth’, in a revival directed by Max Webster, who did the honours for last year’s excellent Donmar ‘Henry V’.
He’ll be joined by Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth – a heavyweight star in her own right, who played Hamlet at the Young Vic a couple of years back.
The production will use binaural technology to create ‘an intense and unnerving 3D sound world’, apparently – we’re not exactly sure what that is going to mean in practice, but audiences will wear headphones and presumably elements of it will be not unlike Complicte’s hit ‘The Encounter’.
