Robert Hastie is artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, but should he want a second string to his bow, he would fully merit an associate post at Shakespeare’s Globe with a portfolio for its indoor winter space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Hastie’s Macbeth fully, wonderfully gets the measure of the play, of his ten-strong cast and of the Wanamaker itself.

Hell is murky, as the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth remarks, and it certainly is here: the evening begins with actors extinguishing the candles which are this Jacobean-reproduction theatre’s only lighting, until only three remain. Later, Macbeth’s encounter with the witches when they show him a succession of visions takes place partly lit by a single candle, partly in total blackout. Actors carry personal candle-spotlights and there is much tactical lighting and snuffing. This isn’t the first production to make such proactive use of the Wanamaker’s lighting characteristics (last year’s The Secret Theatre was the first instance of it I had seen), but it integrates beautifully here with the material and other aspects of the staging.

It is by the drawing of tapers, for instance, that the choice is made each night as to which three actors will play the witches; on press night the trio included Michelle Terry, the Globe’s artistic director and more immediately Lady Macbeth. Her husband is played by, er, her husband, Paul Ready. Ready is a rare bird in that he has an actorly way with oratory, but instead of keeping us at a distance from his character it clarifies nuances and levels and paradoxically allows us in deeper. Terry has the same sensitivity in a more understated form. We can identify every significant moment in Lady Macbeth’s journey: the hesitation in reading out his letter when she realises that power is within their grasp, the singsong tone she adopts tactically to chivvy him along in their wickedness, the moment when she first realises he has overtaken her in the ranks of Hell and even, possibly, waking from her somnambulism to realise what she has allowed others to hear and retiring to kill herself in remorse and shame. But all the cast show comparable insight and skill in handling difficult or silly-sounding lines: even the Macduff family assassin’s cry of “What, you egg!” comes off without significant absurdity.

Hastie invests similar thought and care in every aspect of the production. Much use is made not just of the gallery above the stage but of all parts of the auditorium and noises off; this is not gimmickry, but conveys a sense of events outside characters’ control, of threatening irruptions or just eeriness. Laura Moody leads a trio of singers in what sounds like mediaeval polyphony with occasional Bulgarian-style intervals... but the texts they are singing are in Enochian, the allegedly angelic language propounded by Elizabethan magus John Dee. The Macduffs’ child is often portrayed as a precocious nipper, but I’ve never before seen Banquo’s son Fleance as a truculent teenager. This has been a year of many Macbeths, most of them at best adequate. This is the one to see.

Written for the Financial Times.