It was a revelatory theatrical week. Wreathed in the supernatural. Fuelled by groundbreaking technology. Max Webster’s gimlet production of Macbeth – the third major staging of the play this year – excitingly fuses tremendous acting from David Tennant and Cush Jumbo with Gareth Fry’s cutting-edge binaural sound. You listen to the play through headphones. Which prove not distracting but enabling. They don’t shut you off but wire you in. They are the aural equivalent of a proscenium arch, focusing attention.
In your ears, inside your head, are the urgent thoughts of Macbeth, the spitting whispers of the weird – here “wayward” – sisters, the cawing and flapping of crows, the snap of a broken neck, the unflinching laments of Alasdair Macrae’s Scottish folk.
