Macbeth has always been the foundling child of Shakespeare’s performed canon. Its highly figural, often poetically clotted, language lends itself to the mind, not, as Cawdor attests, to the impatient eye. Traditional productions defer to a sweeping, panoramic stage, to a volley of action in which the ‘imperial theme’ itself is an act of manic machismo: paradigmatic, not personal. Staging the performance within the annex-like confines of the Corpus Playroom is an admirably bold move – either proving affectively oppressive, or a rather messy kitchen-sink drama. Though there were flashes of the first, it soon descended into the latter.

Tom Adams's decision to set the play in an austerely Edwardian Britain felt a little hackneyed: characters move, shadow-like, through an imposing sanatorium-cum-home of broken toys and bodiless voices. We open with the perverse solace of childsplay: a motif which recurs throughout. When possessed with fear, Macbeth gropes his face with a childish disbelief, when crowned King his legs dangle from the throne like a petulant play-monarch. The conceptual labouring of this grimly endometrial prophecy was both arbitrary and half-pursued. The couples’ barren angst is almost anesthetised by their clinical surroundings.

The cast themselves, though, shine against their drab backdrop. Paul Adeyefa is a fine Banquo, quietly virtuous, whilst Oskar McCarthy plays Macduff with rough strength, the vengeful operator to Chappell’s simpering Malcolm. In an interpretation of near-Ibsenian trimness, with little guts and gore, such figures are needed to remind the audience that this is, ultimately, a tragedy of the bloodiest kind. It is James Parris’ Macbeth, however, that is the real star turn: his tragic hero is a timorous Oxonian chap, one coerced into his Fate with a hunted bewilderment. He delivers his ‘dagger’ soliloquy bashfully, as if addressing a stranger on a bus, with quite mesmeric effect. After the ‘swelling act’ itself he reappears as a preening King, all Blairite smiles and flourishes, only to be seized by ghoulish apparitions, to crumple into a snickering neurosis.  By the end he is a figure of majestic horror, Parris’ impressive register stretched to its very bellowing limits. His dark seductress is, on the other hand, surprisingly lilting. Lady Macbeth’s hushed, geisha-like delivery is moving, yet Laura Batey, an accomplished actress, is granted no credible severity. We cannot believe that this woman would dash out her baby’s brains.

Perhaps the greatest problem with this production is its distinct resistance to the macabre. The Witches appear as midwives, administering their prophecies with a matronly gruffness – their hoary, primitive power quite lost. The confined set didn’t help, more like a panto-booth than royal residency, with fumbling stage manoeuvres and clumsy exits.  Any illusion of supranatural agency was swiftly, inadvertently dispelled: we are compelled to pity, but by no means fear. Adam’s close reworking might prove there’s life in the battered prophecy yet, but this kind of blood-lust must be mounted with ‘sound and fury’, not whispered like a demonic lullaby.