Macbeth
Shakespeare's shortest and most violent tragedy. A Scottish general murders his king after his wife and three witches put the idea in his head, then watches his sanity disintegrate. The play runs barely two hours and moves like a thriller. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene remains one of the great depictions of guilt in literature.
Shakespeare front-loads everything. After the banquet, Lady Macbeth disappears until her sleepwalk, the Hecate scenes are probably another playwright's padding, and the long Malcolm-Macduff test in England stops the thriller cold. You also have to read it somehow; on the page, without actors, the witches drift toward homework. It was built for a stage, and a fast one.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
