Macbeth is butchered

Yes, this was a real shock-horror Macbeth, but not in the way intended. I dread the thought of ever again witnessing anything as spectacularly dull as Calixto Bieito's Mafia or contemporary gangland production.

It is as though Macbeth had been transported to the world of EastEnders. Bieito, an iconoclastic Spanish director, has already blazed a trail of outrage and excitement by investing classical opera productions with cocainetaking, trouserless males sitting on lavatories, sexual orgies and buggery.

Now he has had a similar, though more timid shot at Macbeth - acted in Catalan and Spanish with English surtitles - and left it in shattered fragments.

While modernising Shakespeare he has butchered the text. Instead of revitalising Macbeth for our own violent times, he has made it banal.

The Barbican Theatre publicity machine tantalised and titillated us with false promises of "unrestrained scenes of violence, sex and drugabuse". Admittedly in Bieito's Teatro Romea production, a mini-skirted Lady Macbeth submits to various degradations and there is a spasm of necrophilia too distasteful to describe.

And the horrific murdering of Lady Macduff and her children seems disturbingly protracted. But otherwise this Macbeth strikes me as infinitely less shocking, less chilling than Shakespeare.

Bieito's version, with the Barbican picture frame stage excitingly opened up, looks disappointingly domestic, without a serious sign of Mafiosa in-fighting. There is more of a discordant, partying atmosphere - even a barbecue takes place- and Miquel Gelabert's interesting, troubled Banquo launches into song.

So this Macbeth is deprived of supernatural evil, of foreboding, of fearful apparitions and ghosts. No wonder that the words "deep damnation" are removed from Macbeth's agitated soliloquy about murdering Santi Pons's vulgar, drunken Duncan.What remains? Unprecious little.

There is only one witch, a frightened bespectacled young woman in a short skirt who is no more threatening than a nanny. This Macbeth happens in a huge, galleried living room with three white sofas and a hideous carpet. Playful children, often on scooters, romp and roam around distractingly. Irrelevant partying takes place rear-stage while murder is planned out at the front. How gross and crude and simplified it all becomes.

Mingo Rafois's small, tubby, shaven-headed Macbeth, in livid pink shirt and jeans, wanders around looking less like Bruce Willis than a retired night-club bouncer, morosely in search of a new vocation. Bieito has so grossly truncated the text, removed characters and wilfully reorganised the text, that Rafois lacks opportunity to agonise over murder or feel the pricks of conscience. He behaves like a blustering Mafia thug.