Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- London's latest ``Macbeth'' is a wild ride full of the ``sound and fury'' of Shakespeare's text.

Patrick Stewart, giving his fourth accomplished Shakespearean performance in 12 months, presides over butchery, lashings of blood, and casual sadism. Rupert Goold, the director, has a Stalinist take on the play, backed by an ominous hum throughout.

Fine though Stewart was in ``Twelfth Night,'' a Goold- directed ``Tempest'' and, particularly, ``Antony and Cleopatra,'' none of those compare with the unbridled ferocity of ``Macbeth'' at the Gielgud. This is director's theater writ large, with Stewart along for every manic step of the way.

There are times when Lorna Heavey's video and projections combine well with composer Adam Cork's disturbing soundscape. At other points, the showy production becomes merely show-offy.

It does reawaken the visceral alarm of Shakespeare's play, which clocks the murderous freefall of a couple who come adrift in a world of witches, prophecies and severely disordered natures.

Goold's witches emerge as nurses first seen attending none too compassionately to the bloodied sergeant. While snatches of video suggest a militaristic Soviet regime on the march outside, the three share a subterranean, tiled space that is kitchen, slaughterhouse and prison. (The design is by Anthony Ward.)

Goold must be drawn to the lower depths: His recent London revival of ``The Glass Menagerie,'' starring Jessica Lange, put the Wingfield family at the bottom of a long, deep fire escape.

This ``Macbeth'' is three hours, an hour more than customary stagings of Shakespeare's tragedy. Goold needs the time to let his stagecraft land. The banquet scene with Banquo's ghost is staged twice in different ways, before and after the intermission.

Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth, resembling a vulpine 1940s film star, all but makes a mini-aria out of the single word ``sleep'' -- the very thing she is deprived of.

Stewart's Macbeth is so attuned to the heart of darkness that it consumes his life. Goold has an obvious career ahead of him directing opera or slasher movies -- whichever comes first.

Beckett Fragments

It's not unusual for directors to play fast and loose with Shakespeare, who is capable of withstanding whatever conceits come his way. The late Samuel Beckett is another matter, not least because the Irish Nobel laureate has an estate that keeps a careful eye on productions of his work.

How surprising, then, to see the liberties taken in the Young Vic/Theatre des Bouffes du Nord coproduction of ``Fragments,'' five Beckett pieces in one hour. Surprising, that is, until you note that the director is Peter Brook, the Paris-based Englishman who nearly rivals Beckett in the theatrical legend sweepstakes.

Beckett's celebrated solo ``Rockaby'' is spoken by the always arresting Kathryn Hunter, whereas the text dictates that the performer is listening to a recording. The two-person mime ``Act Without Words II'' calls for a goad to be wheeled on. On this occasion it drops from above like some sort of outsized pencil.

Do the plays add up? The whole seems less than the sum of its parts, and Brook's tinkering doesn't do much to tease fresh meanings from the text. The title, ``Fragments,'' says it all.

``Macbeth'' continues at the Gielgud through Dec. 1. Call +44-870-950-0915 for tickets. ``Fragments'' runs through Oct. 6 in the Young Vic's Maria auditorium. Go to httop://www.youngvic.org or call +44-20-7922-2922.

(Matt Wolf is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Matt Wolf at culvul@aol.com.

Last Updated: September 28, 2007 01:13 EDT