Star rating ****

There's foul whispering abroad for much of this afternoon schools performance of Mull Theatre's look at Shakespeare's darkest couple of hours. Crisp-packet rustling, too, come to that, which at times threatens to drown out director Alasdair McCrone's bijou six-actor version, played out on Alicia Hendrick's wooden bird-house of a set. Fortunately, there's a lot more going on here than in the recent Royal Lyceum production, which appeared to drive most of the front stalls to drink during the performance itself.

There's no fear of that here as Sarah Hawarth's Witch opens the play wheeling on a doll-size pram. The hall of mirrors from which this schizoid sprite appears to conjure up the entire gory saga through some twisted adolescent fantasy re-imagines history with even more sex and death than usual. Hawarth remains onstage throughout, slipping into character as The Porter and others when fate or her own split personality requires it. Such ubiquity reminds one of Alex Norton's similarly haunting Zelig-like turn in Bill Douglas's neglected cinematic masterpiece, Comrades.

The Macbeth that Hawarth's Witch creates is littered with dark entries, from Alan Steele's multi-faceted Thane himself to Beth Marshall's quiet intensity as Lady M. Then there's the hoodied up assassins of the Macduffs and Martin Low's droning medieval score that sounds like a homage to film director Kenneth Anger's more lysergically-inclined rites. Such an elemental approach might be taken further if placed in other hands, but the framing device of Hawarth's Witch by itself restores a supernatural pulse to a play that is all too often invested with a sense of ordinariness which Shakespeare surely never intended.