VOLCANO Theatre Company return to Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea this weekend with Macbeth Director’s Cut, a radical classic from the Volcano back catalogue which has been remade for a Wales-wide tour.

It is 18 years since Swansea-based Volcano Theatre premiered its breathtakingly original version of Macbeth, subtitled ‘Director’s Cut’. Choreographed by Nigel Charnock, it was universally acknowledged as an extraordinary performance, and elicited strong responses on every part of the spectrum from awe to outrage.

This autumn, Volcano revisits Shakespeare’s pacy, bloody, eloquent tragedy; handing over the central roles from the company’s founding members to a new generation of performers.

Lady Macbeth is the Glaswegian powerhouse Mairi Phillips, whose irrepressible energy has fizzed through several of Volcano’s recent productions from Chekhov to A Clockwork Orange. Her partner in crime is Welshman Alex Harries, best known as DC Lloyd Elis in the BBC1 drama Hinterland.

Volcano’s Macbeth strips back the text and redistributes the lines of other characters between the killer couple with a purposeful irreverence. This time round, the erotically-charged fury of the original Director’s Cut has given way to a boisterously playful absurdism with a muscular undertow of menace. The emphasis has shifted from destructive sexual passion to an implied backdrop of endemic violence in which the protagonists slip all-too-easily easily from banter into brutality.

Macbeth is directed by Paul Davies, who played the title role in the original production and is Volcano’s co-founder and Artistic Director. Davies has not sought to reproduce Volcano’s original classic more closely. His unwillingness to settle for easy wins or to relax into a formula is one of the things that has kept Volcano’s work fresh and surprising in a changing artistic and political landscape. Not knowing quite what to expect when going to see a well-known play can perhaps seem a bit daunting, but the pay-off is the pleasure of the unexpected. When Volcano goes into the rehearsal room, everything is still to play for.

Tickets for Macbeth Director’s Cut which takes place on Friday 21 and Saturday, October 22 are available now from the Taliesin box office on 01792 602060 and also online by visiting taliesinartscentre.co.uk. Tickets are priced at £12.