Macbeth – review

First seen in 2008, Tim Albery's Opera North production of Macbeth relocates Verdi's opera to an unnamed totalitarian state in the mid-20th century. It's a bleak, unnerving piece of theatre that examines the corruption of intimacy by violence in a world where power is all. Personal and social boundaries are continuously under threat. Assassins in dinner jackets rip of their balaclavas to become preening banquet guests. Béla Perencz's Macbeth is sexually in thrall to his wife (Kelly Cae Hogan): getting off on the thought of the slaughter of Banquo's heirs, they copulate on the bed in which they kill Duncan.

Mindful of Verdi's insistence that the work's three protagonists are Macbeth, his wife and the Witches, Albery presents the weird sisters as controlling both narrative and action throughout. At the start they preside over a creepy dumbshow in which Lady Macbeth gives birth to a still-born child. At the close, they instigate the public defamation of the Macbeths' corpses. Only south of the Scottish border are they absent: but here we meet Robyn Lyn Evans's alarming Malcolm (the role is strongly cast, for once), another blackshirt preparing yet another coup.

It's strong stuff, so it's a shame that the opening night of the current revival didn't scale the musical heights it should. Tobias Ringborn's conducting is solid rather than propulsive. Perencz and Cae Hogan – Wotan and Brünnhilde in Opera North's excellent Walküre in 2012 – are basically Wagnerians. His gritty tone and her metallic soprano sound fine in roles that Verdi wanted to be sung with anything but classical beauty. But neither voice has, on this showing, quite the requisite flexibility for this music. If they get the full measure of it as the run progresses, it will become a formidable experience indeed.