There is much to commend in director Amy Leach’s new production of Macbeth for Leeds Playhouse. In Jessica Baglow, it boasts a Lady Macbeth who is by turns powerfully persuasive and grievously distressed. In Tachia Newall, it has a raw, emotional Macbeth who is one moment ruminative and self-debating, and the next the embodiment of the violence of a cornered wildcat.
Featuring deaf actors Charlotte Arrowsmith (as one of the witches and Lady Macduff) and Adam Bassett (as Macduff) – both excellent – the production is also an inclusive one. However, you wonder how rewarding it is for audience members who are deaf, blind or impaired in their hearing or sight to have only sporadic moments of British Sign Language and audio description.
Presented in broadly medieval costume, it is played (courtesy of designer Hayley Grindle) on a set dominated by a huge, wooden drawbridge. However, despite this impressive component, Leach seems reluctant to pursue the dark and premonitory aesthetic to which it is best suited. Instead, this Macbeth is regularly punctuated by the intrusive work of lighting designer Chris Davey – imagine, if you will, a low-budget Jean-Michel Jarre concert from the late-1970s. As the witches wind their riddles around Macbeth’s brain, a series of white spotlights whir distractingly across the stage. Elsewhere, gratuitously symbolic blood-red light is splashed about with ill-judged alacrity.
This visual gimmickry has a partner in Nicola T Chang’s soundtrack, the self-conscious grandeur of which grates against the production’s subtler elements. Add to this some silly, slow-motion choreography around Macbeth’s dinner table and a dank puddle standing in for the witches’ cauldron, and Leach’s choices start to appear random and disconnected. This is a tremendous pity because, these miscalculations aside, there is a sense of a directorial vision trying to fight its way onto the stage.
It all starts boldly, emphasising the fact that the Macbeths had a child that died in infancy. More bravely still, Leach writes into the play another pregnancy for Lady M, followed by an agonising miscarriage that seems to ravage her mental health.
