Shakespeare’s Globe, London
This brisk staging for young audiences has acrobatic witches and action-movie fights but misses some of the play’s bloodcurdling weirdness

Here is a Macbeth for young audiences that is full of hurly-burly. Lucy Cuthbertson has trimmed one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays to the length of a football match and directs a cast who rarely seem to stop moving. The witches turn cartwheels, Sam Lyon-Behan’s fight direction is influenced by action movies and Banquo’s ghost does acrobatics, even interlinking arms with Macbeth during a roisterous ceilidh.

Played without an interval, this version makes few wholesale cuts but gives each scene a nip and a tuck. There’s no Donalbain, the Porter takes the Old Man’s lines and Shakespeare’s use of repetition, including his web of interlinked imagery, is reduced. That weakens the tragedy’s usual incantatory effect and, while the production is staged with elan, it lacks any ethereal, bloodcurdling weirdness.