In dressing rooms one dares not to speak his name, but the role continues to attract high profile performers. Stalin was hard to top, but in more recent years Pinochet, Pol Pot and Indira Gandhi (to mention but a few) have all admirably filled the old Scot’s blood-soaked boots.

Michael Kantor’s series of thrilling reinterpretations of classic texts continues with Shakespeare’s wildest, most primal tragedy about what happens when a weak, self-obsessed man kills his way to the top. What happens when a single evil deed is tossed into the foul brew of ego, ambition, paranoia, repressed shame and hollow claims to authority bubbling away in the political mind. Of how the subsequent chain reaction of atrocities annihilate religion, duty, friendship, family and, ultimately, reason.

In the deep midwinter of 2003, literature’s most notorious couple were brought alive by two of the most powerful presences on the Company B stage, Jacek Koman and Catherine McClements.