The Scottish Play's Curse Finally Lifts
Macbeth
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
The notorious jinx on productions of Macbeth has often seemed to be working overtime at the Stratford Festival, whose main stage has groaned over the years under the weight of half-a-dozen versions, none of them successful. Last Friday night, the curse was lifted: not completely or definitively, but with strength, imagination and a couple of star performances of which one is praiseworthy and the other superb.
John Wood's production is notable among other things for its defiance of current wisdom. Most people believe (I do) that these days the play stands its best chance when mounted in a small space, acted by a small cast, and set in some kind of timeless limbo. Wood, with no apparent qualms, manoeuvres a full company over the full festival platform, and even has the gall to state in the program that the play is set in "Shakespeare's 11th century." Obviously this is not quite the 11th century that you find in the history books, but it does oblige the actors to wear pre-medieval helmets in which they could easily look ridiculous but somehow don't. Scotland stands pretty much where it did, with bagpipes and even the occasional bold stab at an accent; but the play does not degenerate, as it often has at Stratford, into a procession of anonymous warriors clad in plaid.
The production likes spectacle; it is the first in my memory in which Birnam Wood looks as if it might really be coming to Dunsinane. It also creates a social world. Servants and other dependents bustle through its stately homes; witches and other outcasts, forming an alternative order, huddle around braziers on its blasted heaths. Tricks are played with the order of scenes, but they justify themselves. At other times the text is treated with jaw-dropping, and possibly misguided, reverence.
Shakespearean collectors are afforded a rare opportunity of seeing the Hecate scenes, which few scholars think are by Shakespeare and nearly all productions automatically cut. Mythologically, Hecate is the goddess of night, in charge of evil spirits. If she has a function in the play it may be to create a hierarchy of bad. If you want to know which witch is which, then she's the witches' witch; even the Weird Sisters are afraid of her. As played here though (by Joyce Campion) she's an ineffectual old biddy of whom the junior crones -- a businesslike corpse-robbing bunch, led by Rita Howell -- can hardly wait to see the back of. I don't see the point, unless it's to underline what a fool Macbeth was to listen to any of them.
Wood throws in a couple of puzzling musical interludes of his own. He ends the tragedy with a dirge for the Macduff clan, as if the play had really been about them -- a belated suggestion, not to say an untruthful one. At the front end of the evening, Lady Macbeth has starred in a hootenanny cabaret, for the benefit of visiting King Duncan. It seems an over-elaborate way of demonstrating how two- faced she is.
But all such lapses can be forgiven just for the staging of the murder-scene itself, with the Macbeths hovering in darkness at opposite sides of the main acting-area, which is bathed in an inverted pyramid of white light. (Gil Wechsler, the veteran lighting designer, has done inspired work throughout, but this is his masterpiece.) They have shut themselves out of the daylight world; they have also erected an impassable barrier within their marriage.
Lady Macbeth, practical and unimaginative, thinks that one killing will do the trick, and after that they can reign happily ever after. Macbeth knows or suspects better, but he allows himself to be drawn along; the first murder snaps his conscience, and he becomes a full-time monster, leaving his wife far behind and on her own. That is the orthodox reading, and this production sensibly follows it. When Graham Abbey as Macbeth returns from killing Duncan, saying simply "I have done the deed," he says it in the voice of an incredulous zombie. And from there he fatally rebuilds himself. Abbey shows us the process in meticulous detail; he takes us, as any successful performance must, inside Macbeth's mind. What he finds there, though, has more sinew than colour. The very qualities that I have always admired in this actor -- lucidity, intelligence, a complete absence of mannerism -- may betray him here. Macbeth is the trickiest of the tragic heroes because -- unlike Lear, Hamlet and Othello, whom we meet in something approaching normal circumstances -- he has no ground zero. He only speaks a single line before the witches are at him. The actor has to tell us who he is by injecting some personality, maybe even some eccentricity of his own, and this Abbey either neglects or fails to do. Technically, this is a fine performance that meets every challenge. As a stage in the evolution of Graham Abbey, it's interesting and encouraging. As a portrait of Macbeth, it is wanting.
Lucy Peacock's Lady Macbeth is common-sense operating, at least in her early scenes, on the level of neurosis. Her invocation to "unsex me here" is matched by the contemptuous cradling gesture with which she dismisses her own experience of motherhood; the spirits have answered her, sooner than she knows. I have never seen an actress fail with the sleep-walking, but hers is one of the best. It, too, is staged in startling, brilliant illumination, but this time with the actress in the centre of it, roaming and crawling over a giant white sheet: She is in bed but her eyes never close. The audacity of the conception is matched by the performance, which plumbs depths of despair I never imagined were in this actress. This must be the performance of her life. The director again does too much in bringing her on, unscripted, to find her suicide-weapon but you can see why he wanted to give us a final look at her.
The concentration that marks both these performances, especially in their scenes together, extends through the cast. A couple of minor roles are exceptionally well played. William Needles, with half-a-century of Stratford work behind him, makes the Old Man both a believable part of the fabric and a moral force. Robert Persichini freshens the Porter's speech by making it both the original "knock knock" routine and the credible utterance of a tired man on a cold night.