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Brighton Year-Round 2025

Macbeth

New Venture Theatre, Brighton

Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: New Venture Theatre Studio

Festival:


Low Down

Something dream-like this way comes. And it’s about love. A six-hander, three of whom are witches marks the imaginatively-filleted vision of this Macbeth directed at New Venture Theatre by Steven O’Shea till January 25th.

A production which shifts bubbles in the earth. And now we are of them.

Review

Something dream-like this way comes. And it’s about love. A six-hander, three of whom are witches marks the imaginatively-filleted vision of this Macbeth directed at New Venture Theatre by Steven O’Shea till January 25th.

O’Shea has taken on board Harold Bloom’s conviction that “The Macbeths are the happiest married couple in Shakespeare.” Against this though the Witches take centre-stage, and though their second major appearance and latter prophesies are shorn (since this version doesn’t support their denouement) the Witches take on lines from others, as well as multi-roling as murderers, guests, attendants.  The antimonies of Macbeth’s love and evil are stripped back through the catalyst of ambition.

It helps Michael Folkard’s set is a stark diagonal gantry with one flight of steps leading down at an angle to the Studio’s square stage; above which the top and bottom come draped with black curtains: there’s several.  The three Witches: Sophoulla Gibson, Bridgett Ane Lawrence, and Grace Vincent enter in a different atmosphere. That’s not simply Strat Mastoris’ greenish and red lighting, but the trio’s slithering – working memorably with movement director Natasha Higdon – marks a world peregrine from the trio of mortals.

Eyeing the audience obliquely from the stage floor as they stare up at them inches away, they become “bubbles of the earth” in Banquo’s phrase. Lawrence in particular proves mesmerisingly adept in sliding up and down poles at alarmingly acute degrees. Each actor inhabits a subtle difference. Lawrence is most eerie and shape-shifting, Gibson skittishly girlish, Vincent solemn, authoritative, suffused with ritual. These slight differences dictate their supporting roles elsewhere: Vincent a good Murderer, or attendant for instance.

Alistair Lock’s sound is amongst the very best NVT have produced. A hum of menace, of the intangible, it thrubs throughout: the only parallel to it is the Wanamaker’s 2018 Macbeth, which had the advantage of sinister rapping outside its inner doors. Sequenced with Mastoris’ lighting, it carries some storytelling. As do the excellent costuming and make-up teams.

Macbeth (Jonathan Howlett), and Banquo (Lewis Todhunter) stride on besmirched by war, but the heath hints no dint of arms: battle-noises are banished, and the Witches not only appear in the same hallucinatory stillness, but later become official bearers of what they prophesied when Macbeth assumes Thane of Cawdor for instance.

Howlett’s riveting: he’s carried his dark before, notably in Dennis Kelly’s Orphans (2018), Taking Care of Baby (2024) and memorably Butterworth’s The Winterling (2019). But the love of say Eldridge’s Beginning (2023) is there too. He’s ideally suited to the title role. He speaks with deliberation, never ponderousness and thought pulses from him. It’s never laboured, though the production’s notable for its even pace. No thrill of battle or alarms touch it. That could pall but the acting throughout ensures it doesn’t. Emphasising the poetry, heightened in this reduction, Howlett’s struck with wonder; and his slow turning on Banquo is subtle.

Lewis Todhunter’s Banquo – the hero who never gets his due form Shakespeare – flourishes here with most of his lines intact. He fills a greater proportion of the slimmed-down play. More thoughtful, amused, less ambitious but upright, Todhunter suggests someone subtly aware of the shifts in his friend. Todhunter’s alertness since his stunning debut here in Cock, notably through The King’s Speech, BLT’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and particularly Shakespeare in Love radiates leading qualities. Here Todhunter fines down his allure even further, and his capacity, like Howlett’s to listen makes them a formidable duo of half-glances. The audience are left hoping his final appearance shadows Mastoris’ lit set-piece: an eerie banquet. 

Amy Brangwyn’s Lady Macbeth is a revelation. Warm, sexy, shocked as she sits to the Witches’ prophesy of kingship, she might charge the “murthering ministers’ to “unsex me here” but this is exactly what doesn’t happen. Brangwyn’s ambitious wife is both calculating and loving. When she finishes invoking she shudders involuntarily.

Brangwyn’s shown the first hair-crack down this normally adamantine character; who normally crumbles when she’s shut out of her husband’s plots. Here Brangwyn can’t resist her returning husband. Her partner’s scorn is more when their spouse won’t take promotion. Not that of top-to-toe direst cruelty. Howlett and Brangwyn twine no sparring tango but a dirty dance. With bloody daggers Brangwyn’s naturalistic, not steely.

Some will miss this ferocious heritage, but there’s pay-off. Brangwyn dimly perceives the Banquo plot: but her exclusion here is not her chilly function removed, but loving trust. We jump from Act III to V, and Brangwyn after calming the guests immediately teeters and descent is rapid. Macbeth’s last speech cradling her is a pieta; the witches come in to take up some of his last words, all four uttering a finale. It must be seen.

Brangwyn, another New York-trained actor who’s touched NVT as Goneril in last year’s King Lear and memorably Sarah Siddons in BLT’s Kemble’s Riot is a singular Lady Macbeth, making it her own.

Indeed O’Shea’s assembled four cast-members normally helming shows. Lawrence who’s studded productions from New York to NVT (Proof, Suddenly Last Summer, Liasions Dangereuses) and BLT (The Graduate) modulates from suave to deathless malign with a wisp of languor. It contrasts with Gibson’s flitting laugh, held in her eyes, and Vincent’s marmoreal, remorseless tone: that of a sleepwalker who wakens terrors.

Now a strikingly tragic love-story, this is a Macbeth for those who know the outline. 90 minutes (plus interval) had one audience member asking what Macbeth does next. But for the other 90% at least, this is a production which shifts bubbles in the earth. And now we are of them.

 

 

Assistant Director Gaby Bowring, Production Manager Kasha Goodenough, Stage Manager/Props Gaby Bowring

ASMs Bryony Weaver, Anne-Marie Harrison

Set Design Michael Folkard

Lighting Design Strat Mastoris, Lighting Rigging Strat Mastoris, Mireille Pedder, Will Neal

Lighting Operation Alex Epps

Sound Design & Sound Operation Alistair Lock, Assistant Sound Operation Chris Dent

Set Construction & Painting Simon Glazier, Sam Deards, Dan Tranter, George Walter, Leah Mooney, Tomasz Baraniecki

Costume: Karl Petrie, Karen Hindmarsh, George Marshall, Sam Howard

Makeup & Hair Emese Csoma, Sam Howard, Emma charlotte, Evelyn Bodi

Poster Strat Mastoris

Programme Tamsin Mastoris

Publicity Photography Strat Mastoris and Kasha Goodenough

Script Prompt Ollie Wilson

Publicity & Social Media Kasha Goodenough

Health and Safety Ian Black.

Many thanks to Milla Hills from Southwick Players, Pat Lyne, Brett Fancy and Katie Brownings, Bryony Weaver, and Box Office FOH and Volunteers

Published