This is Shakespeare on the edge of a nervous breakdown – or more accurately: some way over the edge of a nervous breakdown. This is Macbeth as you will never otherwise see it. Full of energy, almost brutal physicality, humour, violence and imagination, it transposes Macbeth into a downmarket-Mafia-style gangster troupe in which everything is cheap: women are cheap, booze is cheap, death is cheap – and life is very cheap. There are some amazing performances: Roser Cami as Lady Macbeth, Miquel Gelabert as Banquo and especially Mingo Rafols as Macbeth are the outstanding figures in a maelstrom of vigorous, unrestrained, muscular play-acting – in which the vices of these virtues are too apparent: longueurs of wild over-acting interrupt the general progress, even from the principals. And how the cast escaped without serious injuries after so much uncontainable violence and hurling-about on high scaffolding and a hard wooden stage, no one will ever know. 
      All this is trademark stuff for the young, iconoclastic, adventurous Spanish director Calixto Bieito, who has elicited things primaeval from his Spanish cast, thereby making them abandon themselves to their task on stage. It is an orgy of theatre, a Bacchanalia of performance, which has left discipline behind and sought for ultimate expression instead. Calixto Bieito's directorial vision sees the nakedness in things: in ambition, fear, lust, drink, murder, hope, and hopelessness. His cast unleash everything in realising that vision for the audience. The result is spectacular, breathtaking, and needs to be seen to be grasped fully. Let's hope Bieito will be back soon with more Shakespeare – although one scarcely dares to imagine what he would make of the assassination on the Ides of March, or the vile jellies in Lear, or (perhaps it ought not to be mentioned to him) anything whatever in Titus Andronicus.
AC Grayling