Hitting the Bullseyes
Macbeth
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer
This has been an spectacular week for acting. It was dominated by the RSC Macbeth, which reinforces at the Warehouse the impression it made last year at the Other Place. It is the best Shakespeare production I have ever seen, combining minute textual scouting with throat-seizing emotional power.
At Stratford I dispatched the supporting cast with a collective superlative. This time round I would like, gratefully, to name names. First the witches, a businesslike non-cackling trio, relying less on Satanic vision than malicious determination. Marie Kean, the peremptory ruler of the coven, receives grizzled support from Judith Harte; they are earthbound, with your Susan Drury—the initiate witch that wants hard use—their lifeline to the supernatural.
They exemplify many of the production’s merits; alert to all possible contrasts, they can still merge their identities when required. They make their points quickly and firmly; they do not brandish new interpretations, they embody them. They are on easy prosaic terms with their roles, but the roles themselves are so uneasy that we are constantly jolted into poetry.
Griffith Jones’s white-robed Duncan is, unstrainedly, a saint; but it is a moment of self-indulgence—in teasing out the announcement of Malcolm as his heir he raises and then crushes Macbeth’s hopes—that decides his fate. John Woodvine’s Banquo stands four-square, but his mind ranges; the thought of his children as kings seduces him, as surely as it maddens Macbeth. Bob Peck’s Macduff is the steadiest of all; when he speaks of the ills that ‘strike heaven on the face,’ his own voice is a hammer.
The one non-vacillating character in the play, he balances not only Macbeth, but also Roger Ree’s hopeful, doubtful Malcolm, and Ian McDiarmid’s civil servant Ross. Greg Hicks’s Seyton is a streamlined thug whom Macbeth adopts as confidant, when his murderous instincts begin to outstrip his wife’s.
Judi Dench’s Lady Macbeth in fact would kill Duncan and leave it at that. If her husband would be equally content, she might even get away with it. As it is, her breakdown is triggered more by his rejection than her conscience. Exhausted by the events of the banquet, she slumps to the ground. On ‘We are yet but young in deed,’ Macbeth pulls her violently up and half supports, half drags her off. The contact is a cruel parody of the embraces with which she softened him up to the initial murder. There is never any doubt she will succeed; she knows her man.
For Ian McKellen’s Macbeth is worm-eaten from the start. For all his victor’s smiles in the opening scenes, there is less courtliness about him than last year; our first glimpse into him comes when he tells Banquo, ‘Your children shall be kings.’ Envy is already there and, once loosed, it is a consumer. The note is sounded again in Mr. McKellen’s most scornful high tones, ‘Once he is king; he has done it all ‘to make them kings? The seed of Banquo—kings?’ It sickens him.
Envy reaches backwards too, colouring the despair of ‘Duncan is in the grave.’ The words, and in the mind behind them, are rancid; and it is this mood that takes possession of the last act. Everything disgusts him, and his only reason for fighting to the death is that the thought of subjection to Malcolm is the most disgusting of all.
Where Miss Dench succeeds with a carefully built characterisation, Mr. McKellen is more unpredictable, flooding the play with energy as if it were an electric field (which indeed it is). With mental alacrity goes physical bravura: the autonomous bloodstained hand, the quaking leg when Birnam Wood approaches; we are present at the revelation of a consciousness and at the unfolding of a story that pales any horror film.
Trevor Nunn’s production is bleak and simple; the goodies entering Dunsinane find it full of upturned orange boxes and discarded magic fetishes, and they end the play, not unnaturally, in weariness and disillusion.
There is little hope in the evening, but in the hitting of so many bull’s-eyes there is enormous joy.