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The Arts Intel Report

Macbeth

Cush Jumbo and David Tennant in Macbeth.

Panton St, London SW1Y 4DN, United Kingdom

“This is a production that draws us close to the yawning torment of guilt and the cavernous loss of war,” the critic Sarah Hemming wrote in her 2023 review of Max Webster’s Macbeth. Using binaural technology to create a three-dimensional soundscape, Webster and the sound designer Gareth Fry have created an immersive experience that accentuates the oppressive atmosphere of Shakespeare’s murderous tale. Wearing headphones, audience members are enveloped in intimate, haunting sounds that bring them into Macbeth’s paranoid interior monologue. David Tennant reprises his title role in this second run, alongside Cush Jumbo as the ruthless Lady Macbeth. In what is hailed as one of the play’s most successful contemporary renditions, Tennant “handles Macbeth’s soliloquies with ease,” writes Hemming, “hauling us with him on his hellish descent into nihilism.” —Jeanne Malle