Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, but it still usually gets nipped and tucked for performance. Rufus Norris, though, has unusual ideas on this score. His revival retains the usually-cut minor character Angus but excises King Duncan’s younger son Donalbain. Some of the most famous lines and even scenes are jettisoned: the poor cat i’th’adage has vanished, but so has the entire faux-confession scene in which Duncan’s remaining son Malcolm establishes that he is not simply the rightful successor but a virtuous man who would do far better on the throne than Macbeth. In more minor cuts and rewrites, metre counts for nothing.

So that’s what Norris isn’t concerned with. As for what he is... He and designer Rae Smith have created a modern-Gothic look for the play: scraps and tatters (Macbeth’s armour is held on with parcel tape) principally in a choice of two colours, dark grey or black, at least under James Farncombe’s vespertinal lighting. The stage is dominated by a large, arced ramp which, on the stage revolve, becomes the principal entrance/exit, the demesne of the witches or a looming backdrop.

The main draw, however, is the lead casting. Rory Kinnear’s Macbeth is not unlike the Creature (i.e. Frankenstein’s) he portrayed on TV’s Penny Dreadful a couple of years ago: more aware and reflective than usual, but not prepared to let that stop his resolved course of action, once it is resolved. Normally we see a new, hardened Macbeth when he tells his wife not to worry about Banquo’s murder; here, we can be pretty sure that he’s already a convert when he confesses to having killed Duncan’s grooms (having framed them for his murder). I yield to none in my admiration for Kinnear, yet here he is if anything surpassed by Anne-Marie Duff as Lady Macbeth. From first reading hubby’s letter about the witches’ predictions until her final somnambulistic disintegration, she makes every word vibrate with high-tension significance. Praise, too, for Patrick O’Kane, who played Macbeth for the RSC a decade ago (a new RSC production opens in a couple of weeks) and now makes a supremely impassioned Macduff. If only their director didn’t seem concerned with effect rather than substance.

Written for the Financial Times.