‘Blood will have blood’, comes the chilling line in act three of the Scottish play. Murderous vengeance is a major theme of Macbeth, set against its backdrop of huge conflicts, both national and personal. Emily Burns’ modern adaptation dials up the focus on war, starting with a rubble-strewn walk to seats for the audience. As choppers and jets roar overhead, we file past a burning car in a barren landscape of skeletal trees. 

Besides the draw of A-list acting talent in the shape of Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, this Macbeth also boasts a specially built warehouse venue, out beside Edinburgh airport (and tickets costing up to £175 a pop). Beyond the smoking warzone, we find a corporate-sleek set with sliding doors above a grand set of stairs. Varma’s Lady Macbeth is a superbly elegant blend of brittle and calculating, with her pilates spine, CEO energy and a cashmere sweater French-tucked into luxury trousers. Watching Varma’s poise and menace crumble into vulnerability and eventually complete destruction is absolutely compelling. 

But Burns’ rewrite builds scant romantic foundation between her and Macbeth (beyond a quick squeeze of the bum by the weary husband returning from battle) and we see little of the twisted co-dependent bond upon which the central murder plot must pivot. The usually mighty, magnetic Fiennes plays his Macbeth with a distracting posture, hunched uncomfortably for most of the performance, perhaps embodying the protagonist’s enormous burden of guilt, or possibly suffering from an injury, as he doesn’t straighten for curtain calls later. Macbeth’s famous descent into torment and mania, albeit disturbing, feels underplayed.

Where Zinnie Harris’ recent update, Macbeth (An Undoing) took an electrifying, feminist look at the power dynamics between husband and wife, Burns’ version concerns itself more with the masculine, military hierarchies behind Shakespeare’s tragedy. Ben Turner’s portrayal of Macduff brings us one of the evening’s most harrowing scenes, painfully resonant in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, when he learns that his family has been slaughtered.

As the body count rises, the violent strategising and merciless tit-for-tat of civil war peaks with a couple of loud pyrotechnic explosions and flashes of strobe lighting. But those bright bursts of action-movie staging feel like a pale substitute for the real claustrophobia and dark intimacy that Shakespeare’s original story contains.

Macbeth, Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh, until Saturday 27 January; Dock X, London, Saturday 10 February–Saturday 23 March.