The Pop-Up Globe reminds us about the words.  All those years between us and the playwright, yet the words still fight and plead their way out of the story before us.  Seeing MACBETH like this, seeing ten create an army, judging the weakness of a man who speaks out to us for justification of his crimes and the visceral watching of the death of innocents, speaks past to now.   Every aspect of the Pop-Up Globe experience brings us closer to the text where lessons about power and conscience lift from the story.

The building, a faithful recreation of one of Shakespeare’s theatres, has been erected at the Entertainment Quarter and four plays by two separate companies are being done in repertory.  Each has their own embracing of the original, The Dream is being done with an all-male cast, for example, but since this is Shakespeare it’s almost impossible to speak in terms such as ‘traditional’. 

Take the witches.  In film, TV and theatre, even graphic novels, surely every incarnation has been explored.  In this production we have women performers, beautiful women, who are dirty, bruised, scarred and wild-eyed crazy, who move in unison and who come convulsingly alive with a spasm as they ascend from trapdoor Hades to mortal lands.  No extra tricks, no magic or visual effects to give them this pulse and power, just the drum and the strike of metal strings from the music gallery high above the stage and a puff of smoke.

There’s blood of course, spattering the front rows of groundlings and forcing a mass movement that electrifies the pit.  They are treated roughly, these bystanders close in to the action.  Roughhewn solders or armed royal guards force their way through the crowds with no by your leave niceties and the sweat and smell waft after them.  Times there will be, though, when the groundlings stand still to stare up at the events.  In this production, Macbeth’s soliloquys are directed out at them, down to them.  If seated above, one can see the emotions, the rational thought, the questioning disbelief on the faces as he takes those closest as confidantes, implicating all.  It’s a stunning revelation of historical verisimilitude.  As is the redolence of spell making and witch-matched actions of his lady wife alone with her ambition.

Macbeth is played with martial complexity and marital passion by Stephen Lovatt and the disintegration of his reason is deftly portrayed.  It’s his relationship with his wife, played with wonderful presence by Amanda Billing, that I absolutely loved about this production.  The desire of love long-standing … the genuineness of their early interactions are sexy and loving and the decay to weakness and manipulation is conceived so physically.  He on his knees with doubt and she roaming across the wide stage with a gentle pleading.  A delicious slice of staging to elucidate such a well-known scene.

There are other scenes which are equally well known and equally impressively staged and costumed.  The death of Macduff’s family is as violent and detailed as one would expect for those who paid their penny to stand close to the action.  Her child’s head crack echoes in the open space and the wail assaults as her throat is cut with chilling, slow efficiency.   Contrast that with the pissing prosthetic of the Porter!  The opening battle is loud and bodily demanding, Banquo’s ghost has the element of gore and surprise that one wants and the bloody handwashing is on the very downstage as Lady Macbeth’s held-in emotions in public finally give way to the wrack of conscience.

Described in the program notes by Director Tom Mallaburn as ‘magnificent and unsettling’, Pop-up Globe’s production of MACBETH is purpose built for the space and with the text to the fore, the poetry intact and phasing not forced nor unnecessarily elided, a thrilling night of theatre.  And what a joy to hear the un-amplified voice, it’s so rare in big productions.

MACBETH presented by  Southhampton’s Company at the Pop-up Globe [Facebook] plays in repertory until October 30.