Macbeth
Minerva Chichester
*****

All hail to Rupert Goold's mesmerising kitchen-sink Macbeth! It translates Shakespeare's violent, treason-bound Scotland to Stalin's Russia, with newsreel shots of goose-stepping Russian military. Its imaginative invention and capacity to generate shock, suspense and revulsion far exceeds Trevor Nunn's classic studio production in 1976.

After his thrilling wasteland Tempest for the RSC, this amazing young director takes even more radical steps with Macbeth. The production is confined within a windowless basement kitchen, perhaps a few tiers above hell.

Anthony Ward's crepuscular, domestic set with fridge, butler sink and trestle tables opens up to horrors, transforming into a train carriage where Banquo and passengers are assassinated by Russian secret police with silent pistols. A murkily lit, clanking iron lift keeps bringing down ominous and baleful human cargo.

Non-traditional witches, disguised as silent field hospital nurses and serving wenches at Macbeth's ghost-laden banquet, conjure up visions of the future for him with corpses that jerk into life in body-bags. These creatures are all the more sinister as banal, low-key agents of evil rather than croaking hags.

Goold's conjunction of the domestic and murderous creates atmospheres of eerie, sometimes surreal strangeness. Patrick Stewart's fine, furtive Macbeth, who could never manage murder without the practical, goading support of the voluptuous Kate Fleetwood as his steely wife, keeps betraying the signs of frayed nerves and increasingly disturbed mind.

The couple are interrupted in their kitchen- table talk when a retainer arrives to fetch a chocolate cake. Macbeth opens a wine bottle while engaged in his metaphysical brooding about murder and shares the sandwich he makes with hired murderers. Banquo's bloody ghost strides from the lift and stands atop a table, the scene then repeated with Banquo invisible so the ghostly apparition impacts on the audience as it does on Macbeth.

This bewitching revelation of a production, in which Michael Feast's Macduff suffers in chilling quiet, makes us gaze flinchingly into the heart of a modern darkness.