Rona Munro

Forget all that hubble, bubble toil and trouble business, Stanley Baxter has a very different version of events at Dunsinane to tell. He plays Macbeth's porter, sorry, "personal servant", who has polished his rat-stomping, wolf-wrestling master over the years to make him fit for kingship. But all that civilising went for a burton when Macbeth introduces his bride... a strapping lass whose ability to punch out an ox with one blow swept Macbeth off his cloddish feet. The wiles of the would-be kingmaker-porter and the real fate of Duncan play out seamlessly in Rona Munro's clever piece, knowingly spiced with the odd Bard quote. I'm not going to spoil the plotline, but it is nigh on brilliant, with the veteran Baxter still hitting all the notes faultlessly. Almost perfect listening.

There's no holding Stanley Baxter, now in his mid-eighties and apparently becoming as indestructible as Macbeth claimed to be in Shakespeare's play. A new series of The Stanley Baxter Playhouse starts with a comedy written by Scottish playwright Rona Munro which retells the saga from the viewpoint of the clownish Porter. Gordon Kennedy plays Macbeth and Siobhan Redmond as Lady Macbeth consolidates her CV of wicked females, while Baxter himself takes the Porter's role, assuring us that he had great plans for his master, before everything went pear-shaped.