WHILE setting Shakespeare in a psychiatric unit isn’t a new idea, neither is it uncommon for real life patients in such institutions to construct such elaborate self-destructive fantasies with themselves at their fragile world’s centre.

MACBETH, TRAMWAY, GLASGOW * * * *

Both concepts rub up against each other in the National Theatre of Scotland’s boldly audacious reimagining of the Scottish play, which sees Alan Cumming act out the entire play alone onstage for an hour-and-three-quarters.

Flying without a safety net, Cumming opens himself up physically, mentally and emotionally in a performance of fearless bravura.

It starts with Cumming’s character being sectioned and stripped of his 21st-century apparel by two nurses played almost wordlessly by Myra McFadyen and Aly Craig.

With fresh scars embedded into his chest, as Cumming calls to what are both captors and protectors with the Witches “When shall we three meet again?” line, there are hints of a domestic massacre and a possible failed suicide attempt to have caused his incarceration.

Watched over from all angles by a trio of CCTV cameras, Cumming pads about Merle Hensel’s towering brick-lined set in search of healing his fragmented self, but finds only a succession of voices tearing him apart. In the bath-tub he lays splayed and naked as he recounts Lady M’s “unsex me” speech. A wheelchair becomes a pukka King Duncan’s mobile throne which Cumming’s own Macbeth-possessed psyche lays troubled claim to. Most significant of all, a doll is battered into submission and a child’s jumper pressed down heavily into the bath-water.

John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg’s production reimagines Shakespeare as a cycle of self-laceration where often the silent moments are the most significant. With Cumming at its centre, the heady tangle of strength and vulnerability he presents us with makes for a brilliantly troubling play for twisted times.