Being verbally roughed up at the door by an AK47-wielding mercenary is the first indication that this production is extraordinary. Not only is the play brought crashing into the 21st century but, under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark it becomes a snapshot of government and power in contemporary Africa, referencing those corrupt, power-crazed dictators for whom no hideous atrocity – rape, murder, infanticide – is too much.

Danny sapani makes a brilliantly anguished Macbeth, a man making choices and choosing his own fate. Dressed in kilt and Scottish regimental beret, he is clearly modelled on one of Africa's worst butchers, Idi Amin. Monica Dolan as Lady M is interestingly and by no accident the only white person in the cast, evolving into as manipulative and calculating a Lady Macbeth as ever there was.

The piece's immediacy is accentuated by atmospheric touches with light and sound, and the costumes and scenery create a hugely realistic impression of Africa. This production is nothing short of a coup for Out of Joint.

Stands Scotland where it did? The answer to Macduff's question is, in this instance, a resounding "No!" for, in Max Stafford-Clark's inspired Out of Joint production, the Scottish play has been translated to modern Africa with an all-black cast, apart from Lady Macbeth who is a white British ex-pat. This is one of the most thrilling realignments I have ever seen - partly because the performance is a promenade adventure with raw energy and fine detailing.

The audience physically follow Macbeth's journey - from prized soldier to murderous dictator - through a warren of scarred, windowless chambers in this ex-factory building. We even become the "honoured guests" at the Macbeths' violently disrupted banquet. Most disturbingly, when Lady Macduff and her children have been audibly raped and hacked to death in an adjoining room, Macbeth's hired thugs make some extra cash, demanding our loose change as we queue to see the site of this carnage.

Stafford-Clark has done his research and the continental relocation works staggering well, without radical cuts and with few blips. Played by a pushy, brisk Monica Dolan, the fast-rising thane's wife is loosely based on the aid-worker Emma McCune who married a Sudanese warlord in 1990 and was darkly nicknamed Lady Macbeth. Danny Sapani's burly Macbeth also has much in common with Idi Amin, who was keen on witchcraft and wore Scottish army accessories after training with Caledonian officers. Meanwhile, the mêlée of soldiers and French-speaking witches dance ecstatically, flaunting AK47s, transvestite petticoats, fright wigs and war paint. This mix of machismo, weird sexual inversions, and voodoo is startlingly in tune with the play and evokes the strung-out combatants of the Nineties' Liberian fighters who believed cross-dressing gave them a charmed life on the battlefield.

Stafford-Clark is best known for premiering the work of contemporary writers. What's extraordinary is his Macbeth seems like a new-minted play. Almost every scene involves novel touches, and the acting is radically fresh too. Sapani and Dolan plan Duncan's assassination in modern conversational tones, urgent yet utterly pragmatic. Sapani also combines muscular bullishness with pauses for incisive thought and tenderness - a combination rarely achieved. Stafford-Clark has actually tightened up the play by compacting minor characters and keeping them in sight, and the fierce, triumphant drumming at the end is storming. Hugely recommended.

This is not the Scottish Play. It's a Scots-Liberian, Caledonian-Ugandan drama. But no less truthful for that. Max Stafford-Clark's rousing take on Shakespeare's thriller sets Macbeth in an unstable African state, riven by feuding warlords, vulnerable to a despot. Twenty-first-century anarchy maps seamlessly onto 17th-century lawlessness.

The witches deliver their prophecies in both French and English; their male leader is got up in a grimy boa and silk petticoat with something like a small lampshade on his head. The regicidal anti-hero goes to war in a peach fright-wig. The audience are constantly on their feet, pushed around the plot, sometimes at gunpoint.

In one room of the miraculously changing Arcola - bare brick walls, low-hung lights, girders - the spectators are harangued by roaring soldiers; in the next, where chandeliers dangle over the table, and maids offer slices of fruit - the spectators hover round the feast, made no more comfortable than Banquo.

Not all the traipsing around works, but it scores palpable hits. After Macduff's wife and children are killed off-stage (a soldier returns from the slaughter casually buttoning up his trousers), the audience is invited into a red-lit room where they can view the dead family as an installation.

It's not the only time that they are made to feel guilty collaborators in the blood-drenched action. When Danny Sapani's impressive martial Macbeth first considers his future, he comes so close to those watching him, and looks individuals so directly in the eye, as if asking advice, that you can't help but feel complicit. When the Porter comes to do his riff, he spins a plausible tale of being a student doctor who needs funds for his research. He snipes lightly at the apathy of the West: you spectators are, he suggests, pretending to be concerned but really just gaping at trouble. Liberian cross-dressing soldiers; Idi Amin's Scots fantasy; the white aid worker who married a Sudan warlord: there are real-life models for each stage of this interpretation. These underpin the action, but you don't need to know about them to respond to the drama.

Monica Dolan (the only white actor) is whip-sharp as Lady Macbeth. Obsessed and febrile from the start, she's first seen dancing with rapt intensity with the witches, so determined to fit in that she is always going to overdo it; she powders her face with cross little jabs, as if she were trying to spite herself.

The practical considerations of the murder are registered here as in no previous production. As the Macbeths sit plotting away, they have to break off several times as servants whisk through the room carrying gorgeous items for the banquet. Later, Lady Macbeth, her hands dripping with blood, pushes aside a door with her elbow, cautious and calculating even when terrified. It's the sort of pinpoint realism that made Stafford-Clark such a presence as artistic director of the Royal Court.

The UK touring circuit is a massively underrated part of our theatrical ecology, with the same production reaching a far wider and more diverse audience than any other show built for a single venue.

There are a few companies permanently devoted to spreading their work around like this, such as the English Touring Theatre and Oxford Stage Company. Another is Out of Joint, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, powerfully driven by the restless enthusiams of its founder Max Stafford-Clark who remains, for my money, the best director of new plays in the country.

His stunning production of Macbeth gives it such a startling, vividly realised contemporary makeover that it could just as well be a new play too. By relocating the action to a modern African dictatorship, it pulses with a sickening and all-too-plausible reality.

The terror of this play of evil deeds and worse consciences is accentuated and personalised by the fact that we are bullied from room to room to watch it unfold in a succession of different environments.

This is the fiercest, strangest and most viscerally compelling Shakespeare production of the year, with powerful performances from Danny Sapani in the title role and Monica Dolan as his wife.