The play’s focus is split between a thematic tour of an imagined Borges and the daily travails of young members in a present-day book club. The Argentine author is brought to life through a series of visual metaphors, frantically intercut with stark, film-like transitions. Among the vignettes are a wonderful torch and coat-made tiger, a book-built aeroplane fit for a Little Prince, and in one of several nods to Complicite, a flight of paper birds. David Luke steps in and out of slow-motion movement pieces as a silent, foreboding Borges, meeting the audience head-on, while audio excerpts from key works add a secondary, philosophical layer to this bioplay.

The recurrent book club scenes, with their comedic and vernacular tone, are staged in a brightly lit semicircle that purposely disrupts the play’s poetic flow. It allows the group to tackle the Borgesian thematic from the point of view of the club members. Thus, Nick (Nick Pitt) falls in love with Sophie (Sophie Cullen) who soon after begins to lose her sight, placing a well-delivered, sombre slant on the hitherto unquestioned act and meaning of reading. Meanwhile Kate (Kate Stanley) is busy preparing for a life-changing job at the prestigious Bodleian library and uses the group as a sounding board for her trepidations.

The company’s strength is without doubt its tightly coordinated manipulation of space. The ability to transform a tiny, empty square into a detailed, textured and low-tech landscape of the imaginary, bodes well for future work with greater resources. Ambition and ideas are clearly not in short supply here. Where the production suffers is in its dealings with the literary legacy of Borges, which to me is of greater excitement and complexity than the well-noted biographical ‘truths’. This abundance of fertile, provocative writings, many of which have found new resonance in the Internet age, take an unsatisfying background stance in Borges and I.

‘The library’, writes Borges, ‘exists ab aeterno’ and defines ‘the future eternity of the world’. Eternity in an hour is asking the impossible, but a riskier, more intrepid journey into the matrix of a literary mind, his short stories for example, would certainly not go amiss. Watch out for Idle Motion Theatre this summer with their new show, The Vanishing Horizon.

And yet physical and multimedia company Precarious continue to tempt fate and get away with it. Like their 2008 triumph The Factory, anomie is pure techie eye candy. Six giant flatscreen TVs are the set and often parts of the performers, too, synchronising prerecorded and rotoscoped footage with live movement so the cast can appear to fall or step or crawl partially or fully inside the false-coloured world behind the screens. As if that wasn’t enough, precise projection onto gauze or plastic film creates eerily floating apparitions: flowers or shimmering green curtains of binary code. And it all works.

Unlike The Factory, however, anomie’s multimedia aspect limits, rather than enhances, its physical theatre aspect. There are too many long scenes of performers thrashing and squirming on mattresses with their heads inside television sets, and too few of the Gestic tableaux that made The Factory a statement, rather than a technical exercise. Anomie only comes close to equalling The Factory’s images of people packaged and stored like meat when it casts aside the screens in favour of tangible props, like the reams of shiny black videotape that entangle a camcorder voyeur, or the mattress through which two potential lovers blindly explore one another.

New physical theatre company Idle Motion embrace tangible props to create onstage imagery from the very beginning in their gentler, necessarily smaller-scale production Borges and I. Stacks of second-hand books litter the stage, and their torn, clipped, punched, removed and rebound pages tumble out to form silhouetted skylines, or combine to represent an aeroplane, or stack to form a treacherous spiral staircase for Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to stumble around as he gradually loses his sight.

The play is a tearjerker without being maudlin, and the inventive use of books and their pages as props, characters and scenery pieces is consistently surprising and delightful, whereas anomie’s invention, while undeniably technically masterful, soon becomes repetitive. Which just goes to show: even if you can defy precedent and rely on your technology to work, you still can’t rely on it to carry your show for you.

Szkotak’s starting point, it seems, is the power struggle within a decaying kingdom. Political instability breeds fear as Duncan gnaws on his throne and shoots all the messengers who bring bad news, only to be relieved by the sight of a naked traitor in a cage. There is no report of Macbeth’s prowess. It soon becomes clear that the supernatural is the ultimate agent of change. The witches in the guise of nuns and with extended wooden legs glide into the performance space lighting the torches and preparing a welcoming ritual for Macbeth and Banquo. The witches’ prophesies are not only re-enacted as grotesque fantasies; they hover between the real and the un-real. For instance, there’s a scene in which kings line up and tower over Banquo, followed by a boy rolling a king’s crown on the ground. The images merge when the boy later appears as Banquo’s son.

Recurrent images, such as the bullet crown, the boy, the guns, the logs, and the extended wooden legs, become symbolic of Macbeth’s mental state of captivity. The themes of fatalism, entrapment, claustrophobic violence and psychological trauma, are very well played out especially toward the end. Seeking prophesies from the witches, Macbeth is cornered and crushed by a gigantic steel wheel filled with severed heads. Soon after, encroached and overpowered by ‘Birnam Wood’, Macbeth is startled back into the blazing castle where he is burnt to ashes on his throne.

Szkotak’s tactics, made possible by the intimate ambiance of Square2, the National Theatre’s temporary outdoor venue on the Southbank, are to shock and petrify his audience by graphic violence accentuated by sound and manipulation of light. Be it Banquo being hammered to death by burning torches or Lady Macbeth hanging herself, the excruciating horror is within the audience’s reach, as if one could jump in and put an end to it. With Shakespeare’s text replaced by non-verbal, raw and gory action, the adaptation stops one from sympathising with the hero. Szkotak’s Macbeth is no longer a tragedy but a story of an ambitious murderer who is met with a deserving end.