Macbeth

Tobacco Factory, Bristol

3 stars

There are a lot of things you can do to Shakespeare - most of them bad. For actors, the standard trap is to slip into meaningless declamation: sound and fury signifying nothing. Directors, on the other hand, are apt to try and put their personal mark on the Bard by introducing a 'concept', be it a post-apocalyptic Macbeth or a sci-fi Romeo and Juliet set in a galaxy far, far away. It is odd that although he is generally held to be our finest playwright, the one thing that very few people do with Shakespeare is trust him - and the audience's intelligence - enough to stage his plays without gimmicks or hooks.

Although it is a somewhat unwieldy name for a theatre company, 'Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory' does have the redeeming quality of doing exactly what it says on the tin. In the slightly shabby setting of a former tobacco factory, they stage Shakespeare - pure and simple. Not an auteur director's take on Shakespeare. Not a star name's personalised performance of Shakespeare. Simply the refreshing purity of Shakespeare's words and story, delivered with no bells, whistles or high-minded palliatives.

Just as a picture restorer strips away centuries of dirt and nicotine to reveal the glowing colours of the original work underneath, so director Andrew Hilton carefully picks away the fancies and fetishes that are so often attached to Shakespeare to leave a freshly minted text, set on a neutral backdrop of directorial restraint and craftsman-like acting. This enables the onlooker to use their own imagination and to (re-)discover that in terms of pacing and dramatic structure Shakespeare wrote less like today's playwrights and more like contemporary TV and movie scriptwriters. It is when stripped down to the bare text performed on bare boards that the true timelessness of the drama in Macbeth leaps out most clearly.

That is not to say that this is a bland and featureless staging. But the touches which this production adds are subtle enhancements - a pinch of salt rather than a saturation of sauce. Macbeth and his wife (Gyuri Sarossy and Zoë Aldrich) do not need a plasma TV, his 'n' hers video mobiles and a chrome cappuccino maker in their kitchen for us to recognise them as an ambitious executive couple caught up in the heady adrenaline rush of climbing the corporate ladder. Jonathan Nibbs' Macduff is a pleasantly prissy homebody, not natural hero material but a man driven into the hurly-burly of bloodstained politics by the atrocities perpetrated upon him by Macbeth. And Rupert Ward-Lewis' Banquo has a preternatural stillness even in life, as if the mark of death is upon him from the start.

Now in its fifth season, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory still offers the perfect opportunity for anyone put off Shakespeare by a bad experience in the past to see his work in an unadulterated and undistorted form and discover why his fans rave about him with such enthusiasm. And for those already persuaded of his brilliance, it offers the chance to see how much more brilliant he is when his work is not being staged by people trying to dazzle the punters with their own little rays of light.

Toby O'Connor Morse

Runs to 13 March, then in rep in April and at the Barbican, London, in Sept/Oct.

Box office: (0117) 902 0344