Macbeth, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, review: Wonderfully vigorous but lacking psychopathic chemistry

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Among the many opera composers besotted with Shakespeare, Verdi burns brightest to date, coming closest to - and maybe even matching - the Bard’s dramatic genius. His Macbeth is both tempest and cold fire; through music of potent expressive force laying bare the banality of evil which underpins the savage ambition, lust and violence at the heart of the play.

Director Oliver Mears strives towards this unholy marriage in his dystopian, battle-weary production for Welsh National Opera, set in a semi-destroyed Scottish tenement. While his lead duo lacked psychopathic chemistry, however, and the tension drained in awkward set pieces and too-lengthy scene changes, the mighty WNO chorus opened the jaws of hell.

Here the men terrified as a chorus of street thugs in trackies and bobble hats while the women proved a fearsome tripartite chorus of witches; gruesomely malformed in body and soul through atrocities committed in the name of tribal fealty this side of the phantasmagoric divide.

Of the soloists, Luis Cansino’s Macbeth was stiffly unconvincing as lover or tyrant, while Mary Elizabeth Williams gave his far ballsier wife a disturbing vocal beauty from murderous harpy to wretched somnambulist. Conductor Andriy Yurkevych was occasionally flat-footed, but the WNO orchestra played with the wonderful vigour we have come to expect.

A co-production with Northern Ireland Opera. Until 23 November, Wales Millennium Centre (029 2063 6464) then touring: www.wno.org.uk