Macbeth @ Hull Truck

This is a Macbeth that's very much about the audience. No matter where they turn, Shakespeare's Scottish nobles, caught in the close press of Hull Truck's staging, can't escape the eyes fixed on them.

Mainly because Gareth Tudor-Price's adaptation is being staged in the round, which is a first for the new Hull Truck space – and a welcome one. Reducing the playing area has brought the audience closer to the actors than previous productions, serving to increase the audience's sense of involvement as well as bringing back a little of the claustrophobia of the old Spring Street venue (or tin shed).

Intimacy and claustrophobia are two things Tudor-Price and his northern cast are very keen on in this production; even the lighting rig has been lowered to compress the space.
The seven-strong cast give a fast-moving performance, rarely pausing for breath or silly things like scene changes. In a way, that's classic Truck – the reclaimed wooden board set is stripped bare, and costume changes are kept to a minimum (so much so that it can be hard to distinguish between some of the characters). It's also classically 'new Ferensway venue' to have vast amounts of haze pumping onto the stage. For once, the haze lends an incredible atmosphere to the play; murky, bleak and sinister all at once.

On the down side, involving the audience so much leads to several scenes being delivered (with not much sense of movement) out to the main seating block, as though the Truck were still in its normal arrangement. Yes, the cast is playing to the majority of the audience, but at the expense of truly playing in the round. A key advantage of staging plays in the round is that the audience can be more easily made to feel that they're eavesdropping, flies on the wall in a conversation between people unaware of their existence. Actors declaiming into the middle distance spoils that a bit.

Tudor-Price's adaptation removes the physical presence of the infamous witches and instead places them around the stage, often as whispering voices with an eerie backing track. They form another audience, always watching the action, as none of the actors ever leave the stage. It's the sort of directorial trick – Tudor-Price is aiming for a highly ritualistic portrayal of the witches – that looks promising when the show opens with the cast's only woman (Fiona Wass) drawing a tight, occult-type circle in the middle of the stage, while everyone stands around looking ominous in their long leather coats. Later, Lady Macbeth uses the same circle to summon the spirits of the night, and it's a chilling flashback to that opening moment. But other than that, there's precious little witchery. All of the supernatural messing with Macbeth's head is just that – in his head.

Don't get me wrong; James Weaver gives a very strong, solid and captivating performance as the Scottish thane promised the crown by a bunch of witches and spurred on by his wife to kill King Duncan. His relationship with Lady M sizzles, their power balance shifting in every scene, always raw with passion. A shame, then, that their supporting cast is a bit patchy, a bit hit-and-miss. Weaver is the best man onstage for listening to those around him, his face (or sometimes even his shoulders) enough to tell the way his thoughts are going. He justifies Lady M's description of his face as a book in which his thoughts can be read.

With all that haze, the lighting for Macbeth is at times genuinely beautiful, evoking different shades of night as well as the heath and castle, and even making the floorlights look like small torch fires (that probably wasn't deliberate, but looked great). The whole production fits into a sparse, brutal vision, where nobody seems to like anyone else apart from Duncan (the Macbeths like each other, of course) and everyone's on edge. The fights aren't so good to watch – too ritualistic, perhaps, a case of heavy-handed 'one-two, one-two' – but otherwise it all looks lean and mean.

Hull Truck has given the city a Macbeth they can get their teeth into, in an accessible version of Shakespeare's great tragedy.