Kings and Drag Queens
Macbeth, Henry IV
Teatro Colletivo di Parma, Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer
When critics write the regulation essay on what they did in the hols, they offer glowing accounts of companies encountered abroad of extraordinary vision, audacity, intellect and good manners. Sometimes they are taken up on this. So comes the Teatro Collettivo di Parma to the Riverside Studios in a season of very free Shakespeare. The Parma Company offered a joke Macbeth set in a film-studio, the protagonists as narcissists; the highlight was the apparition of Banquo, like the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Some of the action was impenetrable, but most was imaginative and good-humoured. Their Henry IV (ends tonight) is more substantial. The audience sits on three sides, a privileged few at café tables, which the actors—eight of them—sometimes share. All the world’s a tavern.
That is very much the angle. The court scenes are raced through. A man who comes on wearing a crown and a carpet must be the king. Presumably he is saying, ‘so shaken as we are, so wan with care.’ He certainly looks careworn. Bad news is brought to him by maimed messengers crawling like biblical serpents.
Confusion descends for those without Italian (and, I gather, for those with it as well.) We become aware of motorbikes racing excitingly round the stage. That roaring fat man with his trousers down must be Falstaff. Certainly he has the presence for it. Watching him later, beaming in his braces, calling himself ‘Johnny,’ we know him to be—what shall I say?—the real Marconi. That mounted tearaway has to be Prince Hal.
The roistering scenes are lovingly, riotously done, Falstaff’s hearers almost choking on their spaghetti as they encourage him in his lies. Romantic pop songs back the revels; Falstaff gets rejected with Peachum’s cynical song from The Threepenny Opera. All is as exciting and immediate as the travellers told. And it’s a play; not just an essay on one.
But we don’t have to feel inferior. Shakespeare in English and Shakespeare in foreign are different animals. Nobody cares if a translation is mucked about with. A British production seeking this degree of license would either have to play against the text to a degree fatiguing to both actors and audience, or paraphrase, which is an abomination. There are those rhythms, prose or verse, and we are stuck with them.
They can take their revenge in strange ways. Howard Davies’s RSC production of Macbeth (Barbican) is as sober as the Italian is high-spirited, but it has a similarly disapproving view of its hero. Bob Peck’s Macbeth is a soldier, and to be a soldier here is to be a thug. Those in the opening scene go on fighting long after the battle’s lost… and won. (I learned that pause from this production’s witches.) Mr. Peck, dour and determined, implicitly denies Macbeth any scruples and the play any real development. The production puritanically denies him a visible ghost to gibber at, but he hardly seems to gibber at, but he hardly seems capable of imagining one for himself.
Despite the discrepancy between what he shows and what his lines say, Mr. Peck speaks the verse superbly; he explores it, inhabits it, makes sense of it, never loses its shape. Vocally and physically, he has the power to occupy space. So do many of the others: David Waller, Pete Postlethwaite, Malcolm Storry makes us feel Duncan’s complaisance, Banquo’s suspicion, Macduff’s grief, as fresh things.
There is an overpowering devil-porter (Geoffrey Freshwater), who dismisses comedy with a leer and a caper; and, in Sara Kestelman, a Lady Macbeth whose command is instant and whose crack-up is harrowing. There are also two percussionists who, playing Nigel Hess’s score, seem to have usurped the witches’ place as governors of the action. Chris Dyer’s skeletal set is surly but shapely. If Mr. Davies can bring himself to like his characters, he will be a fine Shakespeare director.