David Tennant and Cush Jumbo are a formidable couple in this minimal, tightly framed capture of director Max Webster’s staging of the Scottish play at London’s Donmar Warehouse in late 2023.

Sound plays a significant part in Macbeth – the man-made, the natural and the supernatural – and this production makes much of it. At the Donmar, the audience wore binaural headphones through which they heard a shifting soundscape of music and effects and the voices of a closely-miked cast.

The witches are an incorporeal presence: represented in stage mist and whispering voices, blurring the supernatural with what is bubbling in Macbeth’s head. Not for nothing does the Porter (played by Jatinder Singh Randhawa) joke that the audience has paid “sixty quid for a radio play”. Jokes aside, it does work very well in the cinema.

Cal MacAninch (Banquo) and David Tennant in Macbeth. Photo © Marc Brenner

Working on a white square thrust stage just a few paces from edge to edge (upstage is a glass wall behind which we glimpse a trio of musicians, who provide the swirling Celtic-infused score), Tennant is terrific, especially when firing Macbeth’s soliloquies straight down...