macbeth
Stratford festival
national post

Colm Feore playing Macbeth takes time to get into his stride, but it's an impressive one when he hits it. His earlier scenes have the strange effect of turning lucidity into a kind of obscurity. When he lays out the reasons why he shouldn't be killing Duncan, it seems an open-and-shut case; there's no agony, no doubt, no sense that he's actually feeling the very thing he seems to be arguing against. Yanna McIntosh's Lady Macbeth has her work cut out making any kind of dent in him. Macbeth may not be a clever man, but he's certainly an imaginative one; Feore gives us hardly a glimpse of the demons within.

This changes after the murder, in his baffled, agonized recounting of his inability to say "amen." From that moment, he's a lost soul and he knows it. The rest of the performance shows him coming to terms with this. It involves some revelatory approaches to familiar passages. Macbeth's rant, after the murder is discovered, about this being the end of the world ("nothing serious in mortality"), is generally played as an exaggerated attempt to cover up his own guilt; from Feore, it's an accurate account of his own spiritual state. Once enthroned, he slips into the role of self-preserving tyrant with cynical ease. His scene with Banquo's murderers is a reenactment of his own progress; once the tempted, he's now the tempter, and relishing it. It helps that Sean Arbuckle and Peter Hutt play the two killers not as the usual hardened thugs but as men with actual grudges and grievances, itches that need to be scratched.

It takes a ghostly visitation to shake this Macbeth; confronted by Banquo at the banquet, he climbs on the table and tries shooting a man already dead. It isn't guilt that possesses him, but weary frustration. At "blood will have blood" he's halfway down the road to the nihilism of "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," a mood that Feore, unusually and persuasively, prolongs into the final battle. He falters only at the revelation that Macduff is "not of woman born," as in too many productions, both actors rush over this ghastly sick pun-- the climax of the play -- as if they'd heard it already. This isn't a moving performance; Feore, at least in my experience, is not a moving actor, and Macbeth is not a moving character. He should, though, involve you in his nightmare, and Feore does this only occasionally. But he's fascinating and, in damned spots, harrowing.

His real ace is his command, both technical and intellectual, of the text. He continually comes up with surprising new readings that turn out to be absolutely valid. He acts the language, a rare but essential skill born partly of experience, and fully displayed here by only two other actors: Geraint Wyn-Davies, the suavest Duncan I've ever seen, and Tom Rooney, who for five glorious minutes turns the Scottish play into a play about a porter. McIntosh, who's done up to exploit a catchpenny resemblance to Michelle Obama, certainly has the ability, but she only comes into her own after she and her partner have spiritually split up: when they commiserate over their shared need for a good night's sleep, or in her own sleepwalking, which is terrifying. The couple's best moment isn't in the text; just before her death, she silently crosses the stage while her husband asks the doctor about "ministering to a mind diseased." He doesn't sympathize, but he identifies.

Des McAnuff's production is set in what his program-note calls "mythic mid-20th-century Africa." I doubt I'd have known if he hadn't told me. True, one actor appears in a golden robe, and the cast is about equally divided between black and white, plus a couple of Asians. But there's no discernible pattern to the division; and the witches, whom you'd think might benefit, are feeble. The idea seems to be that a regime is being changed through outside -- i. e. English -- intervention. "Stands Scotland where it did?" Apparently not, and God knows where England is supposed to be. This business is what I think of, perhaps unfairly, as American Shakespeare: the imposition of a concept that's at best peripheral and at worst irrelevant. Proof is that Macbeth himself, whom the play is about, never says a word about colonialism: For him, enemies are just enemies. The play's main interest isn't geopolitical, and casting Machiavellian aspersions on its shadowy "good" characters doesn't make them any more interesting. McAnuff's staging ranges from flashy to genuinely imaginative. The banquet is a tour-de-force, and tensions in individual scenes are intelligently exposed. But the production did leave me pondering, as never before, over one of the play's unanswered questions. Given his murderous fury over the prospect of Banquo's heirs succeeding him, does the childless Macbeth intend to try again some time with another Lady? And if so, what does he intend to do with the present one? It's enough to keep her up at night.