Double, Double: Two Troublesome Takes on ‘Macbeth’
London Theater Reviews ByMATT WOLF The New York Times MARCH 22, 2018
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — “Macbeth” is Shakespeare’s shortest and most concentrated tragedy, shot through with well-known phrases and images. Why, then, is it so rarely satisfying when performed? You almost feel as if its infamous witches were having their wicked way with this vexed play, four centuries on.
That question is worth returning to in the wake of fresh sightings of “Macbeth” at two of England’s most established theatrical institutions, theRoyal Shakespeare Company, or R.S.C., here and theNationalTheaterin London. Both have opened hot on each other’s heels. (Enthusiasts of “the Scottish play” can also catch Verdi’s opera based on itatthe Royal Opera Housefrom March 25; the choreographerMark Bruce’s dance-theater version, meanwhile, is touring England through May.)
The R.S.C. and the National’s productions have their virtues. But after seeing them in quick succession, I found myself pondering the curse that apparently haunts this play: It fails more consistently than it succeeds. While many actors find lasting acclaim playing Hamlet or, in later life, King Lear, celebrated Macbeths are comparatively rare, and not a few productions of “Macbeth” have become legendary failures — Peter O’Toole at the Old Vic in London in 1980, to name but one.
Neither the R.S.C. nor the National production is a car crash. But both illustrate the difficulty in finding an appropriate physical landscape for a play whose real terrain is Macbeth’s diseased mind.
What the play needs is some way to make sense of its unyielding savagery and darkness. Who are these jabbering women at the beginning, for instance, and how literally are we meant to take them? At Stratford-upon-Avon, the director Polly Findlay has cast three doll-clutching girls to play the witches. From the opening scene, they locate “Macbeth” in a forbidding supernatural realm that is unique in Shakespeare.
The conceit suits this veritable abattoir of a play in which children exist to be done away with: Why shouldn’t these “weird sisters” function as an eerie reminder of that fact? Except, alas, that — even amplified — the child actors aren’t easy to hear. Later they are pressed into service to move the set around. Have the stagehands gone on strike?
Nor is there much luxuriance in the language as spoken by Christopher Eccleston in the title role. He is a comparative newbie to Shakespeare and charges through Macbeth’s various set pieces with a flat and unvarying vocal attack. The actor comes naturally by the “rugged looks” spoken of by his wife (a jittery Niamh Cusack, who overplays Lady Macbeth’s spousal agitation). But rather than any sense of a murderous king spiritually hollowed out by his own ascent, we get Macbeth as a blunt, bluff pugilist who looks as if he would be happier taking on Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” than ruminating over matters of conscience.
Ms. Findlay, the director, worked wonders with a wacky “As You Like It” several years ago at the National. But her modernist approach this time includes a faceless, multilevel set, drained of color but containing a water cooler next to which sits the Porter (an ever-deadpan Michael Hodgson), who now and then pushes a carpet sweeper around. Both her stars wander into the audience, to little purpose, and Ms. Cusack shows her bloodied palms to unsuspecting spectators in the front row.
A clock above the stage counts down to Macbeth’s death, at which point Edward Bennett’s portly Macduff informs us, “the time is free.”
Anyone craving a fuller sense of the psychic legacy of a warrior at odds with himself is better off with the National’s production, with the ravishingly spoken Rory Kinnear in the title role. His climactic “I have lived long enough” finds more power in a single line than the entirety of the R.S.C.’s brisk reckoning.
Mr. Kinnear has won awards for playing Hamlet and Iago on the stage now hosting his Macbeth, and he knows his way through the sinuous, ever-shifting mind-sets of Shakespeare’s tragic leading men. (By contrast, Rufus Norris, this production’s director, last turned his hand to Shakespeare more than a quarter-century ago.)
The production that surrounds Mr. Kinnear is guaranteed to enrage purists wanting Scottish accents and some explanation for the enormous trash bags hanging from Rae Smith’s cavernously gloomy set.
From left, Rory Kinnear, Beatrice Scirocchi and Anna-Maria Nabirye in “Macbeth” at the National Theater in London.CreditBrinkhoffMoegenburg
A note in the program locates the action happening “now, after a civil war,” amid a grubby, grimy community concerned less with kingship than the mere rudiments of survival. The “royal preparation” for battle referenced in the text here consists of Mr. Kinnear affixing knives to his torso; beheadings, appropriately enough, frame the action.
The soundscape couples ominous rumblings with high-pitched bleats, to evoke a post-apocalyptic ruin of a world in which Mr. Norris’s witches — adults, this time — shimmy up poles to survey the desolation below.
If all this sounds like sound and fury signifying you know what, the result is at the very least an improvement onthe shouty Lincoln Center “Macbeth”in New York in 2013 in which Anne-Marie Duff first played Lady Macbeth. She returns to that role (and to a happier onstage partnership) this time round.
It’s worth remembering, too, that the same play brought to grief at least two of Mr. Norris’s predecessors as artistic director of the National, Peter Hall and Richard Eyre, whose stagings were met with lukewarm reviews, albeit 15 years apart. “Macbeth” demands a claustrophobia and intensity — and a forensic fury — that seems frustratingly tricky to capture, though not for wont of trying. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a third “Macbeth” opening somewhere nearby next week.