The anxiety of Macbeth

What a powerful challenge Greg Hicks lays down to the traditional notion of Macbeth as a butch warrior, prone to swagger, obsessed by longings for top-man status. He helps launch Michael Boyd's season of Shakespearean tragedies with a useful dash of controversy.

Hicks makes a virtue of his slender, athletic physique, confidently exploiting a voice and face that register the nuances of high-degree anxiety to suggest a soldier such as Macbeth might succumb to his highly developed imagination and ambitious longings. How convincingly Hicks weakens as he surrenders to conscience and his wife: Banquo's ghost even has him leaping atop the banquet table and collapsing in its midst.

This Macbeth seems ominously tentative and uneasy when first appearing on Robert Innes Hopkins's unevocative stage set, whose rear wall moves forward in the thrillingly staged finale.

The predictions of the witches - young women heralded by bird-cries - so impact on him, that he edges towards Richard Cordery's unusually virile King as if expecting that he, rather than Malcolm, will receive the royal favours. Sadly, though, Hicks's Macbeth is enclosed in a low-definition, cool and antiseptic production by Dominic Cooke that offers no illuminating slant or perspective.

Military greatcoats, Macbeth's dressing-gown, granny-vest and his wife's pink party dress, stole and choker all vaguely evoke Edwardian times, though the period setting remains doubtful. The fine vehemence and vigour of Pal Aron's Malcolm, Louis Hilyer's Banquo and Clive Wood's Macduff function in a void.

Relations between the middle-aged Macbeths seem disappointingly sex-lite. Sian Thomas's Lady Macbeth, who sleepwalks quite comfortably, is less the murderous goader than an edgy wife, hostess and fashion-victim who fears her husband and their banquet will cause a palace scandal.

It is difficult to judge whether Cooke offers a medieval, Jacobean or modern take upon regicide and religious belief. The production's best idea is to portray the witches as controlling agents. They burst out from under the banquet table, appal Hicks's superbly stricken Macbeth with holographic apparitions and emerge finally to gloat over his corpse.

In repertoire. Information: 0870 6091110.