Macbeth’s climax rests on a witchy technicality that has always felt like it belongs more to 20th-century screenwriting than 17th-century drama: Its power-mad, prophecy-enabled protagonist, having already slain his king and arranged the murder of his comrade in arms, is emboldened to order the deaths of rival Macduff and the man’s wife and children after being assured by the soothsaying weird sisters that “none of woman born shall harm” him. It’s a big reveal two acts later when Macduff, a few lines before cutting off Macbeth’s head, indulges in a bit of autobiography, declaring to Macbeth that he “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.” While a cesarean delivery was inevitably fatal to the mother in Macbeth’s 11th-century milieu, the baby is still “of woman born,” right? Then again, the Three Witches Made Me Do It legal defense is probably a risk any way you slice it.

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s artistic director Simon Godwin has staged his own bloody coup in making Washington, D.C., the only American venue for his contemporary, found-spaces reimagining of the Scottish Play, after prior runs in Liverpool, London, and Edinburgh. Godwin previously directed his Macbeth and Lady M—multi-franchise film star Ralph Fiennes and Game of Thrones alumnus Indira Varma, respectively—in a 2015 Man and Superman at London’s National Theatre.

Despite his spry physique, Fiennes is 61—old enough to play King Lear. But Denzel Washington was 65 when he played the Scottish King in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and like that 2021 film, Godwin’s version—pared to the bone by adapter Emily Burns—benefits from the suggestion that the power couple are driven, in part, by their awareness they’re running out of time to make good on their ambitions. 

There’s an undeniable novelty in requiring STC subscribers to schlep out to a former BET soundstage across Brentwood Road NE from a Home Depot and Giant and march through a set dressed with the flaming steel husk of a car before finding their seats. To call the staging “immersive” would be overstating it, though. Compare this to the long-running, all-the-building’s-a-stage Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More no more: In the local version of Godwin’s opus, punters sit in one of 700 assigned seats (only about 10 percent fewer than Harman Hall permits), and the play proper unfolds on a minimally dressed three-quarters thrust stage. Cast members occasionally venture into the aisles, but there’s nothing in the physical nature of the production that couldn’t have been done on STC’s home court at 610 F St. NW. Last year’s The Jungle, at Harman Hall, was a more unconventional theatrical experience than this Macbeth is. So was Dunsinane, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Macbeth sequel that STC hosted at Harman Hall in 2015.

Even roping in a couple of big-deal screen actors to play Macbeth and Lady M has fresh precedent. It was only two years ago that Daniel Craig followed up his final performance as James Bond by playing Mackers opposite Ruth Negga’s Lady M on Broadway for director Sam Gold. Now we get Fiennes—Bond’s superior M (!) in the latter trio of 007 flicks—bringing a take that’s rather less furiously fervent than Craig’s, and more gently comic. Treason is exhausting, it turns out. Fiennes lets us see the strain. His show of frailty resonates all the more for the martial setting: The big room thunders with the sound of low-flying military jets, and Macbeth and Banquo (Steffan Rhodri) sport battle dress uniforms and body armor. (The set and the costumes are by Frankie Bradshaw.) 

It took a playwright, Martin McDonagh, to recognize that Fiennes, who’d first found global stardom as Nazi concentration camp commandant in Schindler’s List 30 years ago, could be funny: McDonagh’s feature debut, 2008’s In Bruges, was the first movie to find the mirth within an actor whose prior screen roles mostly evinced menace (as in the Harry Potter adaptations) or pity (Quiz Show, The English Patient). 

While the festive dress uniforms Bradshaw has created for the banquet scene unintentionally (?) evoke Fiennes’s violet bellhop getup from The Grand Budapest Hotel—his richest screen performance, by my troth—it’s the bumbling brute of In Bruges that most prefigures what Fiennes does here, even if his Macbeth is still a man who operates more by intellect than instinct. He slays his way from soldier to monarch but finds that his civilian suit doesn’t flatter him the way his fatigues did. When Macbeth puts his chest plate back on during the climactic siege of Dunsinane (“I throw my warlike shield”), Fiennes straightens his posture—showing us that the uniform is wearing him. 

The weird sisters (Danielle Fiamanya, Lucy Mangan, and Lola Shalam), meanwhile, dress in puffer coats, tattered denim, and chunky boots, evidently displaced by whatever campaign of urban “pacification” Macbeth and his troops have just concluded. The 2012 film adaptation of Coriolanus Fiennes directed and starred in used a similar modern-warfare setting. Godwin seems to be locating the seed of Macbeth’s destruction within the madness of war itself rather than from supernatural stimuli. It’s a strong take, albeit one that deflates some of the play’s most celebrated set pieces. The appearance of the murdered Banquo’s ghost, for example, is more funny than haunting: It’s just Rhodri with some blood on his shirt.

Varma’s Lady M is of a piece with this banality-of-evil ethos: She’s quiet and interior, projecting less certitude than others have in the role. I like that she and her spouse are alternately sickened and titillated by the socipathy the witches have awakened within them. The Macbeths seem to take turns being the author of their campaign and the accomplice, as though the evil they’ve uncorked cannot long be contained within a single vessel. They also seem credibly hot for one another in the early scenes, which brings in a jolt of film noir energy, as though even a long-married couple can be led astray by lust. While Burns’ edit omits Hecate, it ends with the weird sisters looking on in horror, as if they too are appalled by what their own forecasts hath wrought.

Ben Turner’s Macduff is a worthy adversary to this cursed pair. The actor’s sturdy humility is a solid counterweight to the wicked couple’s mania, particularly in the impossible scene wherein he is informed his wife and children have been slain. Is the guy who brings an end to Macbeth’s brief and bloody reign a hero? I’m not sure, but he does his duty with clarity and competence. Godwin, Fiennes, and Varma do, too. This Macbeth may be less radical than we were promised, but it’s as bloody, bold, and resolute as you’d hope.

Macbeth (approximately 2 hours, 45 minutes, including one intermission), presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company, written by William Shakespeare, adapted by Emily Burns, and directed by Simon Godwin, runs through May 5 at 1301 W St. NE. shakespearetheatre.org.

The production is mostly sold out, and additional dates will not be added; however, a few tickets may become available due to cancellations via STC’s website.