Macbeth
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

The Royal Shakespeare Company must sigh by now with boredom at each new rave bequeathed it for a comedy or history, but the ecstasy-file on its treatment of the tragedies in comparatively thin. Trevor Nunn’s production of Macbeth with Nicol Williamson two years ago was expected to add to it but fell short; and when it was remounted at the Aldwych, all stripped and shorn, it disappointed more; its simplicity seemed false and merely modish.

Mr Nunn’s third attempt is also in a fashionable mould. Staged in Stratford’s small acting chamber, the Other Place, it is in the line of Buzz Goodbody’s miniature Hamlet. That is a good line, though and Mr Nunn surpasses his model while leaving his own earlier Macbeth far behind. To find a match for this new production with Ian McKellen in the lead, you have to go back 14 years to the Paul Scofield-Peter Brook King Lear and the new offering, being less tendentious, may even have the edge.

On the square of floor that serves as a stage, a circle is outlined in black. Around it stand a few potent props: a kingly robe, a thunder sheet, and also some boxes on the circumference, for the cast (a hardworked 16) to sit on. While some are performing in the middle of the circle, others watch from outside, but not at random: the spectators are carefully chosen. The witches observe Macbeth as he damns himself, Macduff is just outside the arena when his family are murdered within it. These are all familiar devices, as Stratford and elsewhere; what is impressive is not the invention, but the selection and refinement.

‘How is’t with me when every noise appals me,’ asks Macbeth near the beginning of his progress; at the end, the measure of his fall is that he has grown impervious to sound. Mr Nunn keeps us in a state of grave throughout, alert to every noise from the scratching of the murderers at Lady Macduff’s door to the subtlest change of tone from the actors, who supply so much energy, intelligence and concentration that an adequate critique would need as many lines as the play. The atmospherics are superb; the play gets into your bones.

What makes the production unassailable is that its antennae are directly tuned to the script. I have laughed before at Mr Nunn’s literal way with imagery, but here his correlatives are not only exact, but stunningly imaginative. Macbeth at Dunsinane stands beneath a singly light bulb; on ‘I’gin to be aweary of the sun,’ he shoves it, sets it swinging backwards and forwards, so that it illuminates his face only to alternate beats; seizing it again, he shines it on to a talisman kept in his hand since his last meeting with the witches to remind himself of their ambiguous guarantee of his invulnerability.

When he speaks of his bloodstained hands that ‘pluck out mine eyes,’ Mr McKellen looks as if he might well blind himself with his jabbing fingers. His hands are the key to his performance; at first they are alert and sensitive; when he meets the witches they are tense and stiffen, bunched firsts inside black military gloves. At the end, they are lifeless; they have gone, with his conscious and his sensibilities, into decay and he knows it.

Macbeth knows everything; he is the most self-aware of tragic heroes, and the play makes us free of his mind. (Here of course lies its greatness- not, as we were told at school, in the piling up of external symbols of chaos to point a perfectly obvious moral.). Mr McKellen grants him, too, a certain courtliness, even wit; not merely the horror but the absurdity of his actions strikes him from the outset, and he can regard his downfall as an inexorable joke.

Allowing his pace to pace him amusing; she pulls him along a road he would travel anyway and he can allow himself scruples, knowing she will be there to mop them up. Once her prosaic, limited ambition is achieved, she is of no more use to him and she shrugs her off; ‘she should have died hereafter’ is a moment of exasperation that dares our laughter. He can retreat within himself in a second; he is, as they all say, ‘rapt,’ a few feet away from us and impenetrable.

At the banquet, quizzing the murderer, he switches instantaneously from host to conspirator and back, playing a game with retribution (as once with ambition) until it overwhelms him and he caves fearsomely in. Mr McKellen, with the reputation of a self-consciously Sensitive Plant, is actually surprisingly burly: a believable fighter and a bulwark worth undermining. This time he never slackens or wallows, freshens the most jaded lines; ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ are separated by a silent chasm, beyond which wait sickening vistas of despair. If not absolutely my ideal Macbeth (too much the toy of fate, not assertive enough in his final battle), he is the best I have seen.

Judi Dench, with fewer professional demons to exorcise than Mr McKellen (since she can hardly open her mouth without exuding spontaneity) edges her ring of confidence with steel; murder, as she counsels it, sounds the most sensible thing in the world. And when sleepwalking she emits a hoarse, racking sob which equals (without benefit of Aztec) the vocal exertions in La Mama’s Trojan Women. It prompts the line ‘Her heart is sorely charged’; the triumph of both protagonists is that their passions live up to the claims made for them in the text.

The supporting playing is the best all round at Stratford for years; Ian McDiarmid doubles an unusually funny Porter (hands thrust deep into his breeches) with an equally unusual Ross, a temporising civil servant with briefcase: the production has modern trapping but - apart from stocking on the murderers faces- they are tactful.