Go see it! Talk to those that have seen it! And relish in theatre at it's best. A post-apocalyptic, gritty vision of the greed and violence of man/woman. A captivating performance by each and every cast member. The sheer energy and force to deliver this every day must be recognised and applauded. The visual FX and art direction choices didn't distract, they added to the horror, self-realisation and journey that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth partake. Go, be a part of it. Question yourself and please please do not complain about the seating, heating or audience placement. Think of when an audience stood in the cold elizabethan theatres. Where there were none of the spoils and luxuries of today. You couldn't sit there eating a packet of maltesers for the first ten minutes! (That goes out to the man in row B!) And don't take pictures of the cast out for a drink afterwards. They've consumed, lived and walked a ravenous character for 3 hours! Buy them a drink and walk away!!!

Last night I took my mother to see a master performance of this most difficult of plays. Lead actor, Patrick Stewart, is magical; not just his deep famous voice, but for an ability to inject new life into words that are so well known the entire audience could speak them alongside him in unison like the Lord's Prayer. This production scores a pure and unadulterated 10/10 and must been seen to be believed. Full review here: http://www.outsidecontext.com/2007/10/05/patrick-stewart-in-macbeth/

Macbeth is not my favourite play, though I have seen it many times. This has to be the greatest production which I have seen. The claustrophobic set reminded me of the film "Downfall" and Macbeth's increasing insanity therefore of the fall of Hitler. Lady Macbeth was particularly strong and her deterioration especially poignant. The psychological tensions were brought out significantly. I left the theatre completely emotionally drained by the experience. I would strongly recommend this to anyone serious about theatre. One problem for me is that I hate loud sound effects and being set in a war zone, there were plenty of these.

The post-modern industrial edge to this production fits perfectly with the disturbing play. Lady Macbeth is more human than ever, though, and almost sympathetic in her madness. And the witches!! The weird sisters are nurses-hospital sisters-and I still can't talk about them without getting chills. Bloody, yes, but really an accurate dissection of the dark side of human nature. Mesmerizing. I think this is the Macbeth by which all others will be judged.

I read some of the below reviews with something approaching astonishment. My instinctive response was to conclude that some reviewers suffered from a mixture of ignorance and personal snobbery. But then - we always only see the play "we see". At one level, our opinion is 50% formed going in. I like Patrick Stewart. I was going to be instantly sympathetic to him; it helped he gaved an assured, sensitive performance, chronicling the downfall of a good man, and the final redemption "with harness". The set was fantastic - I am often a little disdainful of modern dress interpretations, but the Soviet theme and the stark, adaptable (yet chilling) scenery was fantastic. Indeed, the modernization worked wonderfully well - with Banquo's murder, the madness at the feast, the fight at Dunsinane. My favourite part of the play was, however, the effective representation of the collapse of Macbeth's personal cache and support, until he is surrounded by dependants and none else. Fantastic!

A previous review mentioned Oliver Hirschbiegel's superb film Downfall, a spot-on comparison, though the set put me in mind of that old war film, The Man Who Never Was. The transfer to this setting works wonderfully well, Kate Fleetwood is equal parts icy and sexy as Lady Macbeth, but inevitably it's the incendiary, sinister Stewart that you can't take your eyes off. Both myself and and my mother (an English A-level teacher who knows the text inside and out) were amazed at the new life this cast were able to bring to the play, and all of us were amazed to find the well-worn ghost scenes presented in a way that was genuinely frightening. First class.