There is no such problem here. Macbeth is, famously, the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It is no wonder that, à la the Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent production featuring Hollywood star Jai Courtney, it is often the target of filmic stage treatments. Indeed, STCSA marketing has been promising a ‘cinematic’ production for weeks. Equally, though, it is eminently Shakespearean in its ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’, clocking in at one hour and fifty-five minutes with no interval. There is not much a director needs to do to ensure that time passes quickly in Macbeth; it is a breathless sort of play, lean in its exposition and stripped of much in the way of comic relief. A singular, obsessively iterated theme, murder, sits at its centre, compelling relentless action. This is, after all, a play that belongs not to a scholar as in Hamlet, but to a soldier.