19 SEPTEMBER 1952, Page 11

Macbeth. By William Shakespeare. (Mermaid.) Tins Macbeth is a reconstruction.

The stage is Elizabethan ; the accents and acting style are meant to be. There is here much for Shakespearian students to discuss. To the ordinary playgoer the accents, seeming to hail from all corners of modern Britain, will be more obvious than the acting style, which is scarcely archaic enough to attract attention. Certainly this academic exercise in Elizabethan speech and movement is not violent enough to kill the play. That happens from other and more natural causes. Macbeth and his lady must create a greatness, and this Bernard Miles and Josephine Wilson fail to do. Imagination is left instead to dreary speculation upon " speech-sounds similar to those commonly employed by educated Londoners at the beginning of the seventeenth century."