Filter and Tobacco’s latest production of Macbeth is not one for the traditionalist, writes Tim Hughes

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?” No... it’s a man in jeans and T-shirt rubbing a bucket of blood, and a pile of feathers all over his face. Oh, and look, there’s a half-naked man with red marker pen all over his back, and a heart with arrow scrawled on his chest. Someone is throwing cheese and onion crisps around and drinking a can of Coke, And look, instead of three witches huddled around a cauldron, we have members of the cast, dressed for a night in, twiddling with knobs and antennae on banks of electronic instruments. And noise...oh the noise!

Filter and Tobacco Factory theatres’ postmodern production of Macbeth is not for the faint of heart. Or easily confused.

Neither is it for newcomers to ‘the Scottish play’. The script is mangled, sampled and drowned in sound and the staging overly-stylised: Inverness and Dunsinane left to the imagination, with a bare stage enlivened only by constantly pulsing, wailing, throbbing electronica.

While at times it feels like watching the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra composing a soundtrack to a late 70s episode of Doctor Who, the cumulative effect of the discordant music is of gathering unease — and madness. It is as if we are inside the heads of the Machiavellian warrior and his scheming Lady — joining their descent into psychosis.

Ferdy Roberts is an intensely brood-ing Macbeth, stocky, tortured and focussed with a manic glare. Poppy Miller, as his wife, is fabulously distrac-ted and paranoid — haunted by their dastardly deeds. It is unsettling and edgy, brilliantly done given the constraints and entire lack of context, though, at times, this does render it an exercise in style over substance — “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” indeed.

The uninitiated may be confused by the cast of seven doubling up on smaller roles and the mashing of scenes, though this does add to the momentum which propels us forwards into the madness.

An interlude where we are taken through study notes to the play is the closest we get to a laugh in this harrowing 85-minute bad acid trip.

If you are familiar with the tragedy, or have even a passing interest in avant garde theatre, do go and see this groundbreaking production. If you are traditionalist, or have an existing psychiatric condition, you may want to stay away. I left twitching in a sweat, hankering for the days of proper luvvies in capes, crowns and codpieces. What a revolutionary idea that would be now.

“Whence is that knocking?” asks the evil Thane. “How is it with me, when every noise appals me?”

By the end of the play, and with white noise and feedback echoing through my cerebral cortex, I knew how he felt.

Macbeth
Oxford Playhouse
Until Saturday
01865 305305