"Macbeth". Donmar Warehouse

McKellen.

Finney, O’Toole, Peck, Williamson, Pryce, Stamp, Jacobi, Howard, Sher, Hicks, Stewart, Cumming, Branagh, McAvoy, Fassbender, Eccleston, Kinnear, Washington, McArdle, Fiennes…

Tennant.

There have been great Macbeths and dire ones over the last 47 years. But no one has come close to the naked revelation of internal suffering, the universal pain of saucy doubts and fears, that Ian McKellen and Judi Dench laid before a tiny audience on a bare stage in The Other Place at Stratford in 1976.

Until now.

David Tennant may be our greatest living Shakespeare actor. He has an uncanny ability to make the text sound poetically pellucid: beautiful, and at the same time as if it’s newly minted, everyday conversation. In his mouth, the most complex sentence structures and the most obscure metaphors are instantly understandable. He democratises Shakespeare. In this Macbeth one of my favourite moments was the scene where he persuades the two nervous murderers to waylay Banquo. Sitting round a table like three blokes in a pub, he sounded like a local miscreant who’s trying to sell some out-of-date meat, full of mingled threats and self-righteousness. He was desperate to be liked. He could have simply ordered them to kill Banquo, but he wanted to be one of the lads. He wanted to be back in the barracks, geeing up his troops, but these borrowed robes were just too heavy.

Max Webster’s Macbeth doesn’t just have David Tennant. It also has one huge, original, game-changing idea – one that would have been impossible back in 1976. It’s the use of Gareth Fry’s binaural sound. If, like me, you don’t know exactly what that means, it’s a completely immersive sensory experience. Each member of the audience has a pair of headphones, and you hear not just the actors on stage, but music, sound effects, whispers, even memories, as part of the action – and the sounds are all around you. If it appears gimmicky, like putting on 3D glasses on your way into Avatar: the Way of Water, don’t worry: it's not. Instead, it’s the key that opens the lock of Macbeth’s true tragedy: this is a play that doesn’t just show you human frailty: it forces you to experience it, along with the central character himself.

So, at the Donmar, Macbeth’s soliloquies take place inside our own heads. ‘We still have judgement HERE!’ winces Tennant, jabbing fretfully at his forehead, and on this occasion it’s physically true, as his words echo between our own temples. Many of the lines are delivered at no more than a whisper, and when Cush Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth breathes softly into her husband’s ear ‘What cannot you and I perform upon The unguarded Duncan?’ it’s as if she is inviting us all into their secret pact. We are all Macbeth. We are all implicated. This is universal suffering. Full of scorpions and binaural sound is my mind, dear wife.

One issue every director of Macbeth has to tackle is of course How to Do the Witches? It’s a question to which it gets harder to find an original answer with every production, and the parade of scary children, warty crones, glove puppets and (on one regrettable RSC occasion in the 1980s) Supremes-style soul singers, seems to stretch out to the crack of doom. Webster’s solution is so elegant and obvious, so fitting for his vision, that it seems like it’s always been there: there are no witches. Like Macbeth’s thoughts and ambitions, they are inside our heads. Having them appear as fleeting, airborne sounds gives them not just a supernatural quality, but also the inescapable suggestion that they are hallucinations, signs of Macbeth’s mental breakdown, proceeding from his heat-oppressed brain.

Like Michael Fassbender’s 2015 film, this production explores the ghost of the Macbeths’ lost child as a source for their familial breakdown. Ten-year-old Casper Knopf plays every child in the play, from Young Macduff, to Fleance, to Young Siward, and heart-rendingly also to the dead child implied in the text (and he’s great, by the way). The poor boy gets killed at least three times, but he keeps coming back for more. One of the tenderest and most haunting moments of the evening comes in the sleepwalking scene when Lady Macbeth’s ‘To bed, to bed, to bed’ is delivered not to herself, but to the invisible child whose hand she holds as she leaves the stage for the last time.

The Porter is another bear-trap for any production. What on earth do you do with this wayward interlude, replete with contemporary references to the Gunpowder Plot? Some love it, some hate it. In Stratford earlier this year they got Stewart Lee to write some fresh, contemporary stand-up as a modern-day equivalent with much hoo-ha, to mixed reactions. At the Donmar, Jatinder Singh Randhawa delivered the best Porter I’ve ever seen. He also departed from the text, with some very funny byplay, making fun of the headphones and the front-of-house staff, but he kept coming back to Shakespeare’s lines too. At the climax of his little scene, there was a stunning moment when the lights shifted to suggest the gate of hell opening before him, and he gazed out at all of us in sudden terror. ‘What… are you?’ he gasped while covering his face. We were an evil he could not comprehend. And we were Macbeth.

Gripes: I could not understand why the production had chosen to change individual words from the text. ‘On thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood’ was delivered as ‘On thy blade and handle’. ‘Almost at odds with morning, which is which’ became ‘Almost at odds with morning, they’re both alike.’ ‘Posters of the sea and land’ were now ‘Travellers of the sea and land’. There were dozens of examples throughout the performance. This wouldn’t matter if it was some obscure text in need of elucidation, but we’re dealing here with possibly the best-known work and the greatest poetry ever committed to the English-speaking stage. You wouldn’t say ‘Shall I compare you to a summery day?’ so why not trust Shakespeare’s language in Macbeth? It was a slight frustration in an otherwise spellbinding experience.

By the time of the final confrontation with his executioner Macduff, Tennant’s Macbeth had become a sad echo of the upright soldier who won the Norwegian war of Act One. He is reduced to prancing up and down and pathetically slapping Macduff’s cheeks, desperately goading him to deliver the final, killing blow. He may say, ‘Yet I will try the last’, but truthfully, this is a mercy killing. And he had so much blood in him.

This is the Macbeth I’ve been waiting for, and it sheds new light and pain on that familiar text. Max Webster is much possessed by death, and he sees the skull beneath the skin. In this production, he allows us to see it and hear it too. In the heart of Christmassy Covent Garden, it’s a gaze into the abyss.