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.

Up 'n' Under @ Hull Truck

A rugby ball sits, waiting, centre stage. A rugby ball-shaped spotlight focusses on it. Smoke fills the stage, beams of light shooting downwards. Is it Wembley? The Millennium Stadium? A true Theatre of Dreams, a Stadium of Light? It's certainly a big arena set-piece to open John Godber's Up 'n' Under at Hull Truck.

Godber allegedly wrote this play after promising to do so at his interview for the job of Artistic Director at Hull Truck. That was twenty-five years ago, and now the Truck has resurrected this tale of a failing rugby side struggling against both themselves and formidable opposition. In a way, it hasn't aged too well, the casual homophobia still being lapped up by 2009's audience. But this audience also laps up the local colour, the banter and the camaraderie of Godber's team. He sets up a fierce rivalry early on, which gets laughs and sets a lightly confrontational tone throughout – what do you expect from a play about rugby with five men and only one woman?

It's in the next scene that Godber triumphs though. It works when he keeps away from the grandiose themes and styles, instead giving the people what they want by sticking some northern blokes in a room to moan and bicker. This is – if you'll pardon the unintentional pun – Godber's home turf, and the scene is a masterclass in both character and dialogue, each line rushing the scene to its conclusion via a joke. Masterful.

You could probably criticise the casting of this play – the singer can't sing, and some argue that Abi Titmuss is just there for the headlines. But at least there's eye-candy for both halves of the audience, and (like many Truck plays) the cast are highly plausible as a unit, if not as individuals. Speaking of eye-candy, Titmuss surely doesn't need to do quite so much work alone in her onstage gym...does she?

There comes a time in this early play when a teacher writes a poem based around the opening of Romeo & Juliet. He actively apes the style of Shakespeare, and the same can be said of Godber throughout the play; he gives an epic scope to the action that tries to raise it above the level of mere amateur rugby up to something higher, something grander. Take, for example, Titmuss setting the scene in heroic fashion before the action starts (then later reminding us of the story so far, in case we'd forgotten...after the first scene), very Henry V. That stadium feels like just one part of Godber's plan to make everything much bigger than it really is. But for all his knowingly-dropped titbits from Henry V and King Lear, Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet, Godber can't get away from the fact that his story is about some blokes who are out of shape and need chivvying up.

What we're presented with is very much a populist piece of theatre. It doesn't engage with any big themes, apart perhaps from the effects of ageing. What it does do very well is tell an encouraging story and raise laugh after laugh, in classic Hull Truck style – no surprise, as this is probably the play which, more than any other, set the benchmark for that style back in the mid-eighties. The ripping of Shakespeare certainly feels like a new writer showing us what he knows and trying things out.

Viewed in such terms, this is a massive success, and deserves the rapturous applause it gets from a nearly-full house. How many of those kids were there because Up 'n' Under is a set text, or were there for Abi Titmuss, is debatable – but if they liked this (they should) and want to see more like it...who cares why they turned up?