He looks as tense as a cat with its hackles raised and poised to spring. His eyes are riveted upon the witches. His voice quivers with anxiety. Greg Hicks's Macbeth leads this would-be king and reluctant assassin into temptation with daring originality.
Instead of the traditional sturdy warrior who falls victim to ambition, his wife and first-night nerves of the murdering sort, Hicks convincingly offers a Macbeth on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the start, ill at ease in his own skin and stricken by his temperament when translating his fantasies into life - or bloody death. When his heart hardens and he turns truculently amoral, though, he misses out on pathos.
Sian Thomas's flame-haired, steel-and-ice society hostess Lady Macbeth, who performs an operatic sleepwalking scene, incites her husband to murder through the force of her contempt rather than seducing with sex-appeal. Unfortunately, Hicks now chops up too many of Shakespeare's lines as if they were cocaine.
Still, his performance, admired at its Stratford premiere in 2004, remains the attraction of Dominic Cooke's fatally anaemic production, with even Banquo's ghost looking respectable. Pal Aron's Malcolm now seems oddly affected and Louis Hilyer's Banquo distractingly histrionic.
At least Clive Wood's Macduff, literally toppled by grief, rings true and powerful.
Robert Innes Hopkins's spectacularly bland design, which consists of a black wall and Renaissance door, sets the nondescript tone. The period is Edwardian, sporting great coats, stoles, long dresses and Richard Cordery's King, who looks as if he stepped out of a 1914 musical.
With 17 actors to eight musicians, this Macbeth strikes intrusively lyrical notes. Evil, the play's fatal intruder, puts in rare, mundane cameo appearances.
The supernatural witches, scrambling up from a trap-door, have the air of down-to-earth, hard-up bag-ladies in need of a threepenny piece. The holographic apparitions that they raised at Stratford have been abandoned and replaced with nothing better.
When the sisters re-appear at the finale, perhaps to confound the idea of Malcolm's inheritance being made to last, they chill no blood. I expect to see parts of Macbeth lit like a lampless back alleyway or swathed in shadows, but Peter Mumford's lighting plot, perversely heralding the king's sun-lit arrival with twittering ravens and darkness, proves, like the production itself, more pale grey than noir.
Until 5 March. Information: 0870 060 6621.
Macbeth
