Macbeth, Royal Opera House, review: Phyllida Lloyd’s fine revival has darkly austere magnificence

The Royal Opera House has been sluggish and tentative in its emergence from pandemic sleep. It’s so nervous about getting bums back on seats that it’s giving 13 performances of its most dependable banker – Richard Eyre’s evergreen production of La traviata – and even that isn’t filling the auditorium. This is a worrying portent for the operatic future.

Yet everything in this season’s ROH repertoire has been good: a boldly stylised new Jenufa, a new Rigoletto gloriously acted and sung, and now a fine revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth. This opera has a darkly austere magnificence, and so does Lloyd’s production. The plot unfolds in a chiaroscuro world under an angrily stormy sky. Anthony Ward’s designs and Paul Constable’s lighting conspire to create effects reminiscent of Japanese kabuki, and the slaying of the protagonist is closely modelled on the climactic scene of Kurosawa’s great film of Shakespeare’s play, Throne of Blood (1957).

Verdi used the play to amplify the aspirations of the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement for the unification of Italy, which was picking up speed as the opera was being composed. Meanwhile, there are moments in this ROH production when one senses the revival director Daniel Dooner pulling us all into the 21st-century present: the courtiers in Macbeth’s palace morph into famished migrants looking exactly like those on our screens from the Belarus-Polish border. The whole evening feels political.

And intensely dramatic. Shakespeare’s three witches are multiplied into a chorus covering the whole stage, their headgear blood-red. Indeed, blood is the keynote throughout, from the crucified naked figure at the start, via the corpses of Macbeth’s victims, to the sanguinary climax. In this world the violence is swift, sudden, and silent. Much of what we see consists of Macbeth’s hallucinations, the image of a gilded cage recurring again and again, first celebrating regal triumph, but gradually containing nothing more than images of grisly dismemberment.

The central drama is presented in bold, simple strokes, thanks to a remarkably strong cast. Günther Groisböck’s Banquo is nobly sung, and David Junghoon Kim makes something piercingly piteous out of Macduff’s lament for his murdered children. And with Simon Keenlyside’s Macbeth and Anna Pirozzi as his wife, we get a chillingly convincing pairing. Keenlyside, a consummate actor, lets us follow all the stages of his descent into madness, and with Pirozzi we get a great diva in the old-fashioned mode: there’s cruel beauty in her sound, and she commands the stage at every moment. The chorus are superb; conductor Daniele Rustioni brings out all the brassy power of the score.