A triumph for crony casting

Michelle Terry, chatelaine of the Globe, wants to put an end to penis-led Shakespeare by casting women in roles intended for men. To showcase her war on male cronyism she presents a version of Macbeth starring Paul Ready as the king. She plays the queen. In real life the two are married. This must be rather galling for the actresses who auditioned for the lead role only to find that Ms Terry’s pro-woman policy had collapsed before the demands of her lord and master. But their on-stage partnership is astonishingly powerful.

Set in the Sam Wanamaker theatre, a gilded little playhouse with uncomfortably cramped seats, this candlelit Gothic thriller has a palpable sense of horror and menace. Behind every flickering shadow lurks a traitor with a dripping knife. Ready, a superb Macbeth, has a handsome, kindly face that suggests a pliable nature easily dominated by his psychotic spouse. Hissing, plotting and brooding, Ms Terry’s Lady Macbeth has let her ambition and hypocrisy curdle into a full-blown personality disorder. Their feuds and rows have an obvious simplicity and truth. When Macbeth’s temper boils over, he manhandles the queen with a brutal roughness and yet their bodies appear to melt into one another in an embrace that looks both violent and loving. Only real partners could suggest such intimacy. This is one of the finest productions I’ve ever seen at the Globe. Ms Terry will now face calls to explore more of Shakespeare’s warring lovers with her husband by her side. A triumph for crony casting.

Human beings are programmed to repeat actions that reward them — playwrights included. Harold Pinter established himself as Britain’s foremost dramatist by placing inscrutable characters in cryptic situations and he was bound to keep the production line in motion, knowing that his oblique scripts would be greeted by genuflecting reviewers, ecstatic professors of literature and shrewd thesps ululating with approval at every rehearsal.