Abstract
‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2): unfortunately, Wils Wilson missed this cue. Lacking a subplot and with the speeches of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth often treading on each other's heels, Shakespeare's shortest tragedy is a white-knuckle ride with impetuosity steering the plot and characters’ hectic improvisations, such as Lady Macbeth's sudden fainting, moving the action forward by leaps and bounds. The play's intensity is dissipated when it becomes ponderous; we’re miles from Hamlet's reflexive interiority. This trudging production (at just over three hours, including a 20-minute interval) interspersed spoken exchanges with long and usually redundant sequences of stage action which did little to enhance the script and did everything to dampen the play's frenetic intensity. There was more interpretive dance than poetry here, at the expense of textual cuts that included Macbeth's goading of his hired assassins ‘Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men’ (3.1.93).
This was a cross-gendered production with Queen Duncan (Thérèse Bradley) as a mother of two daughters (Malcolm played by Shyvonne Ahmmad and Donalbain by Amelia Isaac Jones), and a female Banquo (Anna Russell-Martin) among others. These women dying at Macbeth's hand undermined the shocking murders of Lady Macduff and her children, whilst adding nothing but some unnecessary pronoun switching.
The opening was typical and comprised a minute or two of blowing dry ice around the stage, followed by several brass instruments, bagpipes, vocal keening and percussion making what was simply an awful din while dead birds dropped onto the stage from above. Each witch was birthed from a hole in the ground and rolled around for some time before the next appeared. When all three were ready to go, there was more heavy-handed choreography before ‘When shall we three …’ (1.1.1) was finally spoken. The effect was to retard the play's powerful opening scene and dilute its menace with complicated and entirely unnecessary clutter. I know how clichéd it sounds to ask the director to ‘trust the text’ but quarter of an hour in, one wondered why they couldn’t just get on with it.
Some of the play's most headlong scenes were unfortunately paused by excessive setting up. The banquet involved the elaborate flying in of a rectangular chandelier wired into an electric generator. This was so it could fail, to the groans of the assembled guests, and allow Banquo's ghost to enter during the blackout. But for his second appearance, the ghost merely entered from the stage right vom, and the business of the generator had not earned its keep. As Macbeth started ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow…’ (5.5.18), he stopped mid-line, went into the wings and came back centre stage with a microphone on a stand. He then restarted the speech with one hand resting on the stand and speaking into the handheld mic in the manner of a stand-up comedian. Not only was it inexplicable but it served to stop the scene dead in its tracks, destroying its elegiac world-weariness.
A stand-out performance was Alison Peebles's excoriating Porter. The comedian, Stewart Lee, had been engaged to update this impossible role. Introduced like an Edinburgh Fringe newcomer, and under full house lights, she criticised the audience's school groups who had not read the play and who were being sent to see it by wealthy parents in order to get good GCSE grades. In the manner of Lee's own stand-up, the Porter attacked his own paying audience: ‘I’ve had emails from Nigerian princes that are more sincere than you are!’ and ‘Hey, GCSEs, you know Macbeth dies in the end?’ It was an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched production.
As Lady Macduff and her puppet children prepared to be slaughtered we had to wait while the three witches attached themselves to cables so that they could be flown into the air, screaming. Perhaps the intention of Macbeth's mic and the witches flying was to expose the play's metadramatic qualities but equally, perhaps the sequences were just poorly conceptualised and clumsily delivered.
Much stage time was wasted on superfluous properties such as the use of foil recovery blankets, a huge gold curtain drawn to and fro before being pulled down off its rail, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking with a red light on one wrist and a white on the other, as though she’d just parked her bike outside, shooting vertical flames and snowfall during the Hecate scene and – by now a cliché, especially for damp Scotland – plenty of ‘real’ rain. There were lots of unscripted moments when the production pressed a pause button and the story ground to a halt: Macbeth encouraging the audience to join him in a heartbeat clapping or the execution of Cawdor (hooded and shot in the head) and then led slowly offstage by one of the witches. At best, this was a production which pointlessly supplemented Shakespeare's play with irrelevant material; at worst, it occluded it.
Georgia McGuinness's design set the action in a post-apocalyptic world. The set was strewn with half a dozen enormous boulders. Costumes were an unpleasing combination of Samurai baggy culottes and medieval armour with Lady Macbeth in a bright 1970s yellow pleated dress which looked like something Beverly (from Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party) would wear. Each character dangled a peculiar object from a lanyard – a dog's chew toy that had been presented to Macbeth as a sign of his newly bestowed title of Thane of Cawdor, a woman's face powder compact, a thigh bone and, in the case of Lady Macbeth's doctor, what looked like a human turd (appropriate, I suppose).
Reuben Joseph's protagonist was generally unflappable, though he did mouth ‘What the fuck?’ to Banquo as he was first addressed as Thane of Cawdor. A fit reminiscent of Othello's shift toward insane jealousy seemed to signify demonic possession as he became more violent towards his wife, played by Valene Kane. As they lay down in an attempt to sleep, Macbeth seemed to recall the couple's lost child as he folded a cloak into the shape of a blanketed babe and cooed gently at it: ‘We are yet but young in deed’ (3.4.143).
Ahmmad was an interestingly conflicted Malcolm, on the verge of tears as she confided her affected vices to George Anton's Macduff in the English scene, although the well-lit English court with clean water gratefully gulped by the petitioning Scots would certainly not have been approved by any Scottish Nationalists in the audience for this all-Scots acting company.
The arrival of the English forces from Dunsinane led to some comedy fight sequences (directed by Kaitlin Howard) that culminated in too lengthy a struggle between Macduff and Macbeth. A badly injured Macduff dragged his opponent's body off before returning immediately clutching Macbeth's severed hand, rather than his head. There seemed no rational explanation for this deviation from the text, nor for Macduff's subsequent demise. The final image was of a witch wrapping the hand in a cloth before handing it to a static Fleance.
If this review appears to concentrate too little on the acting it is because here was a production which suffered from too much unnecessary stage business and too little trust in the play itself.