Patrick Stewart in Macbeth

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth opens with the Bloody Sergeant on a hospital trolley, burbling his news and expiring while receiving a transfusion from nurses who turn out to be witches. Later, these hatchet-faced women become the Macbeths’ hatchet-holding skivvies, then waitresses at the Macbeths’ feast. Meanwhile, the dour, brick-lined ER department becomes a kitchen (with Lady Macbeth in an apron), a torture-chamber (with Ross as victim), and a morgue (with body-bags containing the witches’ apparitions). You can’t accuse Goold of lacking imaginative boldness. But questions must be asked of a revival that won uniform raves at Chichester during my summer break. Isn’t it desperately busy and sometimes distractingly fussy? It amazes me that Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood give such fine performances when (for instance) one is required to uncork and pour wine for his guests during a major soliloquy and the other to dive and quake beneath a trolley just after Duncan’s murder. It’s all gloriously inventive… [Stewart gives] a remarkable performance: successively wry, watchful, grieving, angry, astonished, agonised, dangerous, exhausted, bitter, nihilistic. But the suggestion that he’s another Stalin is another example of over-clever direction. Stewart is a lot more interesting than that.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “In its move from the Minerva Chichester to the refurbished Gielgud, Rupert Goold's spellbinding Macbeth has lost none of its visceral excitement, political resonance or textual clarity. The tone is set by Anthony Ward's setting: a white-tiled mixture of abattoir and hospital ward with its own doublegrilled lift. This is a world in which military nurses may suddenly turn into fiendish witches, and Macbeth grows from rugged hero to Stalinesque tyrant. But what captures the imagination is Goold's ability to contextualise. Lady Macbeth greets Duncan in her kitchen pinny; Banquo is murdered in a rocking railway carriage compartment; and Malcolm flees to a court where a whitetied tenor sings a Novello number. Far from being whimsical or tricksy, this roots the action in a plausible world of escalating terror to which England provides a tonal contrast. Directorial inventiveness is also matched by brilliant acting… Stewart has done nothing finer, and he is superbly partnered by Kate Fleetwood's Lady M, whose capacity to imagine dashing out her child's brains is an index of a deeply disturbed mind… A traditionally difficult play is magnificently realised.”

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “What bloody man is that? It's a blood-splattered Patrick Stewart, that's who, giving a truly great performance in Rupert Goold's brilliantly inventive, heart-stoppingly scary production of Shakespeare's portrait of a serial killer. The show opened in Chichester this summer, where it proved the sell-out hit of the season, and now transfers to a West End in desperate need of the red meat of strong drama. It makes almost every other show in London seem tame and audiences will surely fall upon it with relish. There is barely a longueur in Goold's three-hour production, which is almost indecently packed with inspired ideas… The production, inspired by both the Stalinist terror and Orwell's 1984, shows how Macbeth builds a tyranny of fear in which surveillance, torture and random killings are routine. With its frequent use of video, Adam Cork's deeply unsettling electronic score, and constant jolting coups de theatre, the play owes a debt to both classic film noir and Quentin Tarantino. But there is only one moment - when the witches start rapping their spell—when you feel Goold is lapsing into mere gimmickry. Elsewhere his production constantly goes to the heart of the play, illuminating its darkness and showing the terrible price of human evil… Seeing Goold's thrilling staging for the second time I remain convinced that this is the greatest production of Macbeth I have ever seen.”

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: “Rupert Goold’s Macbeth of a life-time is almost permanently set in the vicinity of a kitchen sink and a refrigerator. It manages, though, freshly to convey the elemental sense of surprise, shock and supernatural horror that must have attended the tragedy's early 17th century performances and has long since been lost. Transferred from Chichester's Minerva studio, where critics and audiences were enraptured, Goold's production maintains its mesmerising power on the Gielgud's larger, conventional, proscenium space. The key to the production is its setting within a Forties Stalinist tyranny, fortified by the grainy newsreel of marching soldiers, and its expressionistic staging in a claustrophobic, white-tiled basement. This is a hell's kitchen to which the only entrance is an industrial lift that clanks up and down, bearing its human and ghostly cargo. An atmosphere of existential strangeness develops in this murky limbo which is at once field-hospital, castle-dwelling and metaphysical prison… Stewart, whose fine performance has deepened and darkened since the Chichester premiere, now powerfully registers Macbeth's broody, fearful shifts of mind and his long decline into a disconsolate amorality which leaves Michael Feast's Macduff struck dumb with grief… This historic production enjoys a perfect thrill-factor.”