Audiences arriving to find the RSC’s studio stage fitted out with bar stools may worry they have accidentally booked for Conor McPherson’s The Weir or Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints, plays set in Irish pubs.
This one, though, is Scottish and run by Macbeth, a Glaswegian gangster, and his wife who might be called, in this reading, Landlady Macbeth. The hostelry is unnamed, though we might guess the King’s Head as the action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is largely unchanged by relocation. Duncan, a camel-coated drug kingpin with a cheek scar like chain mail, stays in one of the rooms available but wouldn’t post a good review on TripAdvisor.
