A Royal Opera Classic

Opera productions can often seem like exercises in interior design: detailed attempts at stage decoration or the recreation of landscape, which play little or no part in the telling of the story. This is thankfully not the case in Phyllida Lloyd’s now classic Royal Opera staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth. Her take on Verdi’s uneven piece arguably looks very dated, but the ideas are still meaningful. The enhanced role of the witches - who make sure their prophecy holds true - together with the symbiotic relationship between the protagonist pair’s bed and the throne, are perhaps the two most salient ways in which the director actively contributes to shaping the opera. Anthony Ward’s sets lend themselves to these games, as they effectively give Macbeth and his wife the space they need to think and plot in rather claustrophobic sets,…