Macbeth starring David Tennant & Cush Jumbo – Reviews

"David Tennant thrills in this high-concept production" (Donmar Warehouse)

"The staging is imaginative and expressive, and the audience is immersed in the action by hearing everything through headphones"

"... Max Webster’s concept combines immersion in sound with a fantastically creepy filmic expressionism. We channel the sounds of the play through binaural headphones.... As fanciful as that sounds, there is an intensely focused vision behind it. Superbly directed by Webster, it is full of wolfish imagination and alarming surprise. The action takes place at under two hours’ traffic yet it is not a classically fevered Macbeth but coolly creepy, and horrifying."

"The headphones allow Tennant and Jumbo to talk in low conspiratorial tones. Tennant is a wiry, austere, self-righteous warrior who turns his intelligence into calculating outrage."

"It’s a cool, cocky and utterly arresting production. Tennant’s Macbeth is vicious and yet he makes us feel his character’s tragedy acutely."

"David Tennant triumphs in magical, revelatory staging" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Max Webster’s production is so chilling and exhilarating that watching it is like discovering the play for the first time"

"[David Tennant] tackles another mighty Shakespearean tragic role, and delivers no less of a coruscating triumph."

"Whisper it, though: this one has the exhilarating edge. And whispering is part and parcel of the enthralling spell cast by Max Webster’s compact, monochrome, chilling revelation of a production."

"Those inclined to complain about actors being mic’d-up or a lack of clarity in verse-speaking have their sharp retort here; you miss nothing, and the artifice assists the innate requirement that we be spooked and shaken. There’s at once a sense of eerie detachment and inescapable connection"

"None of this is done heavy-handedly; it’s as if the play is being discovered for the first time – the directorial concept never impedes the fluency and spontaneity of the performances. For almost two hours, you’re held in the play’s grip"

"David Tennant and Cush Jumbo are haunting in Macbeth" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Clever use of binaural technology brings the horrors of war right to the audience’s ears"

"At the Donmar Warehouse, Max Webster’s thrilling staging of Macbeth hurtles forward with the urgency of a psychodrama, propelled by an ever-present soundscape."

"Tennant is tremendous, his body tense and coiled as steel wire, his eyes sharp and hard: this is a man who has clearly already supped with horrors, who feels he is owed something, whose rapier mind is quick to jump from possibility to action. He handles Macbeth’s soliloquies with ease, hauling us with him on his hellish descent into nihilism."

"He is superbly partnered by Cush Jumbo as a clenched, contained Lady Macbeth, whose own slide into madness is quiet and devastating."

"This is a production that draws us close to the yawning torment of guilt and the cavernous loss of war, while the rich aural concept emphasises the eerie brilliance of Shakespeare’s dark, image-laden text."

"David Tennant is simply hypnotic" (Donmar Warehouse)

"... the presence of David Tennant is the obvious attraction — his blood-spattered usurper more than lives up to expectations — but Max Webster’s compellingly ritualistic production also experiments with 3-D binaural technology."

"True, for the first five minutes, you may feel as if you are watching events at one remove, as if peering through a pane. But Tennant is on such charismatic form that you are soon drawn into the heart of the intrigues."

"Cush Jumbo, dressed in a white gown, makes an equally imposing Lady Macbeth. Listening on headphones generates extra complicity between the guilty couple"

"Haggard and careworn, Tennant is simply hypnotic."

"This production of Macbeth has oodles of atmosphere... All hail David Tennant, Thane of Covent Garden (pity about the headphones though)" (Donmar Warehouse)

"More seriously, the stand-out feature of Max Webster’s new production is not so much the acting as the minimalist production itself which is performed entirely to an audience wearing headphones hooked on every seat. Yes, this makes it a bit like listening to an audio book or podcast"

"It’s very impressive. And yes, to use the phrase du jour, it’s ‘immersive’. But it does also get in the way and if you (rebelliously) take your headphones off you realise the actors are not immersed in the same sound scape as you."

"Interestingly Cush Jumbo as his wife, Lady Macbeth, seems in her turn like a difficult colleague. Their chemistry is cold, but compelling. From the start she seems to be suppressing a nervous breakdown"

"Yes, the show has oodles of atmosphere, but it comes at the cost of separating us from the actors."

"David Tennant and Cush Jumbo wire you into the Macbeths’ innermost thoughts" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Max Webster’s gimlet production of Macbeth – the third major staging of the play this year – excitingly fuses tremendous acting from David Tennant and Cush Jumbo with Gareth Fry’s cutting-edge binaural sound. You listen to the play through headphones. Which prove not distracting but enabling. They don’t shut you off but wire you in. They are the aural equivalent of a proscenium arch, focusing attention."

"Tennant’s grace makes it easy to see the contours of the action: he never fusses. Yet there is nothing broad-brush about his interpretation. His gathering determination is made up of tiny unforced moments."

"Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth brims with radiant energy: she goes for the big job because she simply can’t help driving on. Yet doubt always shadows her"

"David Tennant and Cush Jumbo in a Scottish play for the digital age" (Donmar Warehouse)

"It’s stylish, evocative – and slightly distancing. But never for a moment can you tear your attention away."

"The headphones let us into secrets. Macbeth has only to whisper his darkest thoughts and we are there, with his vaulting ambition, inside his head. As he talks quietly to Banquo, he is surprisingly sinister."

"Both performances are wonderfully observed, Jumbo finding nuanced depths that are only hinted at, holding the hand of her lost child in the sleepwalking scene for example. Tennant discovers new meanings in familiar lines, playing on a sardonic sense of weariness as Macbeth hurtles towards his doom."

"This is a cool, studied Macbeth, with a clear view of where it’s headed. It didn’t move me, but in its own chilly way, it strikes deep chords."

"David Tennant is a chillingly single-minded Macbeth in this idiosyncratic take on The Scottish Play" (Donmar Warehouse)

"I wouldn’t quite say David Tennant has been upstaged by a pair of headphones. But as the two-time Doctor regenerates into Shakespeare’s murderous Scottish monarch, you can’t seriously attend the Donmar’s new production of ‘Macbeth’ and say that Tennant – or for that matter big name co-star Cush Jumbo – feels like the defining element of Max Webster’s production. Instead that’s the binaural sound design by Gareth Fry"

"I’m going to be honest, for about half an hour I hated it, or was at least very unsure. The constant stream of sound effects and new agey music feels gimmicky... The main thing that happens is your ear acclimatises and you start to get what’s being achieved with the different speech registers. As evidenced by his Donmar ‘Henry V’, Webster is very good at politics in Shakespeare. And Tennant in particular is one of the most nuanced, charismatic actors out there."

"Once I’d gotten into it, I found Tennant utterly gripping, and so too his relationship with Jumbo’s Lady M."

"There is unavoidably a note of curio to it. But the nuance the actors can bring nonetheless makes it a (literally) quiet revelation, that brings tremendous, subtle performances out of its whole cast."

"David Tennant gives his all but play undone by overarching gimmick" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Tennat and Cush Jumbo star as Shakespeare's murderous couple intent on power but their work is overmatched by some ill-advised aural sexing up"

'I’m open to any tech that enriches a live theatrical experience - hello, Stranger Things! But this is like listening to a very good audio production of Macbeth while watching very good actors mime to it. Interesting, but not something you’d necessarily choose to experience. Which is a shame, as it features the most emotionally committed Shakespearean performance I’ve seen Tennant give."

"She and Tennant have a fierce intimacy: sometimes I took my headphones off to listen to their fervid exchanges unfiltered."

"Director Max Webster prunes the play with ruthless efficiency into an urgent 110 minutes and stages it with elegant simplicity."

"I’d love to see Tennant, Jumbo and this cast perform Webster’s version of the play without the aural sexing-up."

MAIL ON SUNDAY (Donmar Warehouse)

"Every breathy whisper is ultra-audible in this chilly conspiracy to murder"

"Max Webster's pioneering production is admirably atmospheric, but with our headsets on, there is little sense of a live shared experience"

"But effective and creepy though this is, I'd hate to see this heaphone business catch on. It's not really what live theatre is about."

"David Tennant is magnificent – but this production is style over substance" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Director Max Webster’s vision of the play is of a psychological drama, in which wars and kingdoms are of decidedly lesser importance than the fevered recesses of the Macbeths’ minds"

"[David Tennant] assumes the role of the murderous Macbeth in the beguiling studio intimacy of the 251-seat Donmar Warehouse. Yet this intimacy is oddly wasted by the production’s decision to provide the audience with headphones in order to experience the binaural sound design."

"Webster’s vision of the play is of a psychological drama, in which wars and kingdoms are of decidedly lesser importance than the fevered recesses of the Macbeths’ minds. However I must confess that I swiftly started to take the headphones off for extended periods, so as to restore that all-important connection between voice and corporeal actor. What remained missing, though, was that electric sense of audience members having a shared experience and registering each other’s reactions. Instead, we remain forlornly isolated in our own private sound world bubble."

"David Tennant is a compellingly intense Scottish king in Donmar’s show of sonic trickery" (Donmar Warehouse)

"Lady Macbeth’s whispers crackle in your ear as audience members wear headphones in Max Webster’s intimate production, but the sound design can sometimes feel like a distraction"

"... although this is a towering pair of performances, restrain your FOMO: Max Webster’s tricksy, headphone-based production doesn’t fully channel the dark magic of this intimate space."

"Jumbo is mesmerising as Lady Macbeth, her stillness and composure suggesting hidden depths of insanity, her moral compass shattered. And Tennant makes a compelling Macbeth, all restrained, troubled intensity as he steps further and further into a swamp of bloodied ambition. But even so, sound wins over visuals here."