Macbeth
When the National Theatre’s new production of Macbeth embarked on its UK tour, it did so over-shadowed by some pretty grim reviews of its London debut. Given that matters were compounded by the absence of lead performers that were generally considered the show’s saving grace, it was with some trepidation that I settled down to watch the Norwich outing. It was therefore both a surprise and a pleasure to be presented by an imperfect, but bold and visually stunning version of a play that some might argue has been done to death.
Macbeth has been performed so many times, both on stage and screen, that is it surely legitimate to wonder just how differently it could now be done, and to what purpose? Has the play got anything left to give? To that extent, Rufus Norris’s decision to set the play in an unspecified future dystopia might feel like simply ringing the changes one more time. However, I think he deserves a little more credit. Shakespeare (probably) wrote the play while England was still reeling from the Gunpowder Plot, and it is steeped in the paranoia and unease of the time. Had that plot succeeded in assassinating not only the King, but his entire government, it is easy to imagine the country being plunged into exactly the sort of chaos presented by the clear and coherent vision of Rae Smith and Moritz Junge’s immersive set and costume design. Smith’s huge, overarching bridge dominated the stage, and the action taking place around it, bringing both height and depth to a drama more usually associated with claustrophobic interiors, while Junge’s attention to detail lent much needed authenticity to what could otherwise have been a distancing, fantastical backdrop. In this context, Macbeth’s scramble becomes one to the top of the dunghill, with a prize no greater than a clean cup, a generator and nicely cut suit.
Central to this conceit is Micheal Nardone’s playing of Macbeth as a middle ranking gangster, strutting around the stage, hands in pockets, like an overgrown truculent youth. He not so much concocts, as stumbles into, a poorly executed assassination, pushed on by a wife who has quickly worked out that this might be the only way out from the hellish world in which they find themselves. They make an unattractive and uncharismatic couple, and I am still mulling over whether this was clever and deliberate underplaying, or merely second division casting, but it was certainly a change from the star turns that have belaboured the likes of Macbeth, Lear and Hamlet of late. Sir Patrick Stewart, Christopher Ecclestone, Michael Fassbinder and James McAvoy have all had a stab at the murderous Thane, with widely varying results, and all, at least to some degree, unbalanced the result.
This was much more of an ensemble performance, with Mr and Mrs Macbeth just two more characters in a large cast that had few outstanding contributors (though Patrick Robertson as Banquo was probably first among equals) but which felt much more like the complex maelstrom of tensions that would surely come to the boil in such circumstances. So when Kirsty Besterman says, with a shrug that “If we fail…we fail” it is invested with a new significance - we are living out of a suitcase in a concrete bunker, what have we got to lose? Admittedly, this low key approach didn’t always work. The dagger speech was badly fumbled, as was the murder of Macduff’s family, but overall this was a production that continually attempted to bring a new and fresh perspective to a well-loved, but well known, play. It may not have always succeeded, but nothing became the play so much as the attempt, not least in Norris’s willingness to fillet out anything that did not serve this purpose.
All of that interminable waffle between Macduff and the English was ruthlessly excised. Scenes were chopped up and re-sequenced, so that the banquet scene became intercut with the assassination of Banquo, lending the action a driving, cinematic quality. For once we see Lady Macbeth in the aftermath of her suicide, turning Macbeth’s sound and fury soliloquy into a heart breaking lament at his loss and her death. Most audaciously, Deka Walmsley played the Porter straight in a way that had me double checking the text. What is usually a tedious comic interlude became a portent of the horrors to come, with the character repurposed throughout the production as the voice of sanity floating in a sea of equivocation.
It was, of course, equivocation that was central to Macbeth’s final downfall, as he finally realises that prophesies relied on have actually led him astray. Yet even here, Norris seems intent on telling a different story, and I think this is the key to the whole production. In the most significant cut of all, almost all of witches foreshadowing at the start of the play has been removed. In this version of events, Macbeth is no longer something wicked this way comes. He is, instead, little more than a tragic chancer that didn’t think through the consequences of his actions – the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
