THEATER REVIEW: Daniel Craig gets trapped in a ‘Macbeth’ without a clear plan

Whether it’s the humblest high-school production or a starry Broadway affair with an actor best known for playing James Bond, tricky old “Macbeth” always presents one confounding problem above all others: What’s the through line?

Let’s first stipulate that tragedy, people oft forget, is not so much about flaws or sadness but about the human experience of chaos. In all his great tragic plays, William Shakespeare threw horror after horror, temptation after temptation, consequence after consequence at his central characters. Most of the time, the actor’s job is just to react as losses mount and things inevitably get worse. Just as they often do in life.

No problem there: Daniel Craig knows all about Macbeth’s military background and how to be shaken and very much stirred. The British movie star is a stellar stage actor, not to mention a man with a muscular body that looks hard enough to the touch to rival any trunk of Burnham Wood.

In a whole succession of scenes, Craig plays with the idea of exterior calm and interior trauma, meditating perhaps on so-called toxic masculinity or male repression or just how to deal with what the heck is happening now, as the twisted sisters’ prophecy of toil and trouble bites him right in the seat of his own ambition. It’s delicious to watch, as is Craig’s enigmatic moon-faced co-star Ruth Negga, playing Lady M., a mercurial, proactive character whose belated discovery of a conscience comes too little, too late for anyone’s good. Even her own.

So Sam Gold, who is charge of this season’s big Broadway Shakespeare — which opened Thursday at the Longacre Theatre — manages to forge some very cool, and hot, individual scenes.

But “Macbeth” is so full of cynical aphorisms and sardonic observations, it offers something for virtually every human occasion, or every directorial direction. And even though this new production, the final entry in the current Broadway season, clearly has the aim of stripped-down simplicity, it seems to fly whichever way down 48th St. the Midtown breeze happens to be blowing.

We start with the minimalist rehearsal room look that’s always more popular with artists than with Broadway audiences paying a three-figure ticket price.

At the top of the show, the fine actor Michael Patrick Thornton comes out and says, in essence, it’s Wednesday night, people, or whenever, and here we all are and this is what happens in the show. And there are other such little digressions to come, as Gold plays with the idea that the actors are, in fact, playing both outer and inner characters, the Shakespearean events set off by concerns residing in an outer frame.

I’ve no problem with adding text or making an effort to help an audience there for Craig follow the events of the play, but the issue here is that those modern speeches don’t feel organic to the rest of the show; rather, they feel added at the last minute as if some producer had shown up during previews and pointed out to the company that their work was very internalized and thus really hard for folks to follow.

Better, surely, to concentrate on the narrative clues within the play itself. Macbeth really is not that complicated, especially if you have superb actors like Craig and Negga on deck (not to mention the likes of Phillip James Brannon, Lizzy Brooks, Amber Gray and Grantham Coleman and the rest of a very interesting ensemble, some playing more than one character). The play is all about the warring factions of ambition and guilt; no different, really, from what keeps most of us awake at nights, even if we don’t have witches to freak us out.

This is why this play always works so well with an, ahem, older actor playing the man himself: Craig, 54, has been there, seen that, done that: it’s easy to believe that he now understands that the quest for absolute victory is rarely the best course. Craig, of course, is this production’s great, mostly unused asset.

Gold’s production simply lacks narrative drive. You cannot get fully invested in an evening spent pondering Macbeth’s narrative psyche if you don’t comprehend the world. The Gold outer play is trackable to a point (by the end, it seems like this troop of actors are actually refugees from somewhere, passing the time in limbo), but he is so busy setting the play off at a remove, in building a competing absurdist narrative, he forgets at times to actually do the play, or so it feels. And since Christine Jones’ set offers few geographic, chronological or even situational clues, that compounds the issue. “Macbeth” is plenty for an audience, all by itself.

Gold has one of the American theater’s smartest minds and he’ll be back. But this one just doesn’t hold together, formidable assembled talented notwithstanding.