When shall we three meet again? Maureen Hibbert, Diane Fletcher and Valerie Lilley as the weird sisters in The Tragedy of Macbeth. Banquo’s killing and the flight of his son, Fleance (Jamie-Lee Martin in this performance), are swift yet moving the slaughter of Macduff’s wife (Akiya Henry) and children (Myles Grant and Dereke Oladele in this performance) is longer and more abject: we see the children’s throats cut and Lady Macduff thrashing as she is stabbed then drowned in a cauldron of water. The murder scenes are full of physicality, with no sense of flinching away from their horror as children become both witnesses and victims. That changes when Banquo (Ross Anderson) is murdered and the ever more appalling acts of butchery give the play its emotional sparks, also bringing McArdle’s Macbeth blazing to life.
For a while, it all looks and feels like a moving painting, exquisitely choreographed in its motion, beautiful in its eeriness and orchestrations of light and shade, but slightly devoid of feeling. There is no terror in the witches, either: Diane Fletcher, Maureen Hibbert and Valerie Lilley appear stately and benign with their silver hair and grave incantations – more like an all-seeing, ever-present and wise Greek chorus than a supernatural trio of weird sisters. She wilts with guilt into low-key sadness and never quite becomes a centripetal force in the play, or the true “partner of greatness” to Macbeth. James McArdle’s Macbeth appears simply to be an upstanding soldier for the first half while Saoirse Ronan’s Lady Macbeth (who singularly speaks in an Irish accent against the cast’s Scottish lilt) is a gleamingly young, passionate wife, almost angelic in her white jumpsuit in the opening scenes, and girlish in her later unravelling.
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