The Next Generation of Angry Scottish Kings

Macbeth
The Brooklyn Academy of Music
The National Post

Three years ago, the young British director Rupert Goold and the somewhat older British actor Patrick Stewart collaborated on a magnificent production of The Tempest, set in the Antarctic. They have now reunited for a Macbeth set in what appears to be a refectory doubling as an abattoir. This is less magnificent but is still exciting.

The production started in England at the Chichester Festival, then played London's West End, is now at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music and will shortly transfer to Broadway. It has more loose ends than The Tempest, whose frozen-island landscape found a logical place for every character, new castaways and long- term residents alike.

The ideas and the people in this Macbeth don't all sit together as well. The Scotland of this production is a fascist state, as witnessed by much video footage of goose-stepping troops. It's also a hereditary monarchy, though that seems to be a controversial innovation.

When King Duncan formally announces that his son Malcolm will be his heir, he sets off a murderous reaction in Macbeth who, fresh from the witches' prophecies, thinks the crown will be his. Goold, whose direction can be as masterful with small details as with big images, marks the moment superbly, and so does Stewart. His Macbeth is a Junker among the aristocrats, a professional soldier never quite sure where he stands with all the smooth civilians.

He's a divided man in another sense, the seemingly bluff warrior whose imagination keeps taking him by terrible surprise. Initially, the production signals this by changing the lights whenever its protagonist starts soliloquizing. Later, when his scruples have been overcome but his terrors haven't, the gulf between himself and everybody else is still more boldly signalled. The banquet scene is staged twice, once on either side of the intermission.

The first time we, like Macbeth, see Banquo's ghost; the second we, like the guests, see only a madman shouting at an empty chair.

So far, so riveting. And there are many other fine things. Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood) is young and beautiful, a trophy wife with strong but limited ambition; we see what draws them together and what pushes them apart.

Admittedly we get this in most productions, but this one does it with exemplary lucidity.

The scenes leading up to the murder of Duncan are brilliant; like many party hosts, this couple likes to confer and re-group in the kitchen. Later Macbeth practically takes up residence there; he briefs Banquo's murderers while preparing and then munching a sandwich -- anything to keep busy, and to remind himself why it's good to be a king.

The set is dominated by a fridge, a basin (useful for the play's hand-washing motif ) and at the back, a practical elevator with clattering gates, put to ominous use in almost every scene. The last battle is brilliantly evoked. It's made very clear that the invaders have entered Macbeth's own castle, and he has nowhere to run.

However, with so much realistic detail, we become very conscious of the parts that don't add up. Why is Banquo murdered on a train, after it's been made clear that he's gone out horseback riding? For the sake of a reverberant modern image, I guess, but the political colouring is overdone. It isn't really what the play's about (Shakespeare takes kingship for granted) and some of it is crudely laid on.

Then there are the witches. They first appear as nurses at a field hospital, attending to the Bloody Sergeant (whose speech has to be coughed and gabbled through, to justify the setting) before casually pulling the plug on him and revealing their true identities. Quite a coup, even though it means reversing the order of the first two scenes.

They then practically take up residence in Macbeth's home, as evidently in his mind. They don't just tempt him, they practically choreograph his downfall. This makes them too powerful and the hero too weak. Their cauldron scene is scampered through (wrong kind of cooking for this show) and though the trio of apparitions is cleverly done, as so many speaking corpses in a morgue, the filmed procession of Banquo's regal heirs is a mess.

Back to what is good. Macduff 's wife and children are allowed an early and charming appearance, to set up their subsequent slaughter. Macbeth himself, in another powerful departure from tradition, supervises the massacre in person. ("This deed I'll do," he says, and does it.)

The bereaved Macduff is finely played by Michael Feast, who holds the longest of pauses before responding to the intolerable news; the director was brave to put this in, and the actor, who makes it seem like the only possible reaction, justifies the courage.

Ross (Tim Treloar), who brings the bad tidings, is played as a well-meaning civil servant, terrorized by Macbeth's interrogators and guilty about it. And dominating everything is Stewart, whose jovial public face becomes that of an increasingly coarse and sadistic joker -- he hates the men he has to humour -- while his insides crumble.

He's Stalin with an inner life. He doesn't take you as deep inside the cankered mind as did Ian McKellen, the only great Macbeth I've ever seen. (Though older audiences compared him unfavourably to Olivier. These things depend on where you came in.) But it's an eloquent, unflinching performance in which every moment is freshly thought and every thought communicated.

It may be short on grandeur but it's long on truth.