Perplexingly stark, but mesmerizingly watchable, Zinnie Harris’s reworking of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, Macbeth (An Undoing), at Kingston’s Rose (until Mar 23) puts the focus on Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) in a gory exploration of guilt, madness and power shifts.

By the end the cast are using mops and buckets to scrub blood from the stage, while the laundry is having to work 24/7 to ready stained costumes for the next performance, rivalling the Bard’s Titus Andronicus for quantities of spilt claret.

Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper). All pics: Stuart Armitt & Ellie Kurttz

Liz Kettle, playing witch, maid and narrator, joshes with the audience from start to finish with knowing nods and asides in a show where – bar Macbeth himself (Adam Best) – the strongest roles are female.

The original script appears in patches, but this is really an alternative telling as Lady M covers up for her convincingly deranged hubby and smoothly takes the lead.

After the interval (the play runs 2hrs 45mins) everything turns genuinely spooky, with the lighting effects (Lizzie Powell) coming into their own and compensating for the austere scenery, dominated by giant mirrors, reflecting back at the audience.

The Rose was deliberately designed to steer away from the standard proscenium and red-curtain style of theatre, but it’s had to revert for this show as it came straight from a conventional space in Edinburgh and is then heading to New York. It means the Rose’s sweeping auditorium wings are out of bounds as the sightlines are restricted.

Liz Kettle is a witch, housemaid and narrator

The play opens with an almost Morecambe-and-Wise curtain routine from the narrator, who apologises for the lack of painted Highland scenes on the flats.

The script, which includes some very non-Shakespearian language (“I’m the Thane of Effing Cawdor,” barks Macbeth at one point), splices together an entertaining blend of eras, from modern-day to 1930s to the 11^th Century, but the setting is almost exclusively the castle, regularly visited by cawing crows and chilling draughts.

The undoing in the title is a series of rearrangements and side developments to Shakespeare’s original, including oblique references to Scottish independence, to add another layer to this absorbing story.

If there’s one theme that weaves throughout the drama it’s an ominous and unsettling triple knock that echoes regularly around the stage.

Nicole Cooper and Adam Best as Lady Macbeth and Macbeth

Box office: 020 8174 0090 or rosetheatre.org