THEATRE / Victim of contradictions: Paul Taylor on ESC's touring production of Macbeth at Richmond Theatre

KING DUNCAN's throne makes a sinister first appearance in Michael Bogdanov's touring English Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth, which has landed at the Richmond Theatre. A look- out post with the corpse dangling from it (a prominent feature in the early scenes) is slowly lowered from sight while at the other end, joined to it as though on some sort of mechanised metal see-saw, the throne rears into view.

Directly connecting the crown with carnage, it is a stark visual emblem of a perspective on the action the production is keen to draw to our notice. Look, it seems to be saying, Duncan may be pious and admirable and thought to rule 'as the Lord's Anointed', but how does he defend his power except by power and bloodshed?

The production makes a great deal of the fact that the crown of Scotland was not originally hereditary and in the scene where he nominates his successor, Duncan leaves a playful pause before specifying his son. You can see Michael Pennington's Macbeth readying himself to be chosen and, deflated, only able to offer Malcolm grudging homage afterwards. Keyed up by having just valiantly defended the state and by his recent honours, this Macbeth clearly expected the witches' prophecy to come true at that early juncture in a painless, bloodless conferring of the succession on him as a further reward. It is as though he has been unfairly passed over for promotion, the top job earmarked for the boss's son.

It is highly unlikely, of course, that Shakespeare himself wanted to make these points, especially since Macbeth is the play which, above all others, betokens a special relationship between the King's Men and James, the monarch who had given Shakespeare's company his royal patronage. The tragedy deals, in part, with the hero's violent threat to the male line of the man James regarded as his direct ancestor, Banquo; it would therefore be an odd place for Shakespeare to put about the idea that Macbeth was simply the victim of contradictions in a feudal society, the man who exposed the link between force and authority that rulers like Duncan covered up.

For long stretches, though, this novel conception impinges very little on a harsh, brutalist production which stubbornly fails to come to life. The acting, for the most part, is uninvolving and crude. Jenny Quayle's Lady Macbeth does a lot of villainess-grimacing when sane and a fair bit of silent screaming when she's losing her grip. But even in the mad scene, it is possible to remain completely detached from her plight. As Macbeth, Pennington seems to have joined the John Wood school of unnatural verse- speaking, all attention-seeking throb and mannered expressiveness. You would have thought that the 'the sear, the yellow leaf' speech would be impossible to perform unmovingly, but when Pennington gets to the line about the things which should accompany old age that he cannot look to have - 'As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' - he says the word 'love' on a little high hopeless laugh, as if to say 'ah, the droll, bitter irony of it', with such a calculated nicety that the speech switches from the affecting to the affected.

Indeed, the liveliest thing on stage is the mobile look-out post, which transports Banquo's ghost and gives Malcolm an exciting looking fairground ride in the final showdown.

Macbeth continues at the Richmond Theatre, Surrey (Box office: 081-940 0088).

(Photograph omitted)