Macbeth
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Rupert Goold
At the Gielgud Theatre in London
A review of the performance on Oct. 15, 2007
Superlatives come too easily. Words like "mesmerizing" and "magnificent" have been applied to this production of Macbeth, when their moderate counterparts "impressive" and "noteworthy" would be more accurate, at least in this man's opinion. The performance was very good, much better than most, but to call it the best I've ever seen would be an exaggeration.
So, I begin this review by violating my own words. The highest moment of the evening did not involve Patrick Stewart, who plays the title role. It came instead from the risky but clever reaction of Michael Feast, as Macduff, to the news of his family's slaughter. Though I didn't time his subsequent pause, it must have lasted a full minute. He stood center stage, while looking out over the audience and saying nothing. He allowed the shifting look of shock and bewilderment on his face, the repeated stifling of his own voice, and the audience's frustrated expectation of an outburst, to drive the tension, and to drive the tension so far that one wondered whether Feast had forgotten his next line, was egregiously overacting, or was just teasing the audience to see how far they would let him go with what might prove to be his own little melodrama. In fact, during this minute or so of fascinating silence, some murmuring did arise and a few snickers escape, until finally the long-awaited paroxysm of grief and anger satisfied us all. Feast's provocative manipulation of the audience was no less than brilliant.
And that's my one superlative. I still don't know whether he thought Macduff – or anyone – might in fact react this way to such ghastly news or whether he wanted everyone in the auditorium to think about how closely human emotions can resemble each other. Creating such a challenging ambiguity requires consummate acting skill.
Not surprisingly, Patrick Stewart was fluent as Macbeth, giving us a loyal warrior, a tractable husband, and an arrogant megalomaniac, all of them believable. I'd have preferred, however, a slower transition from the first to the third at the hands of his wife; I didn't get the sense that Lady Macbeth's proposal to assassinate Duncan took her husband aback. Even if he'd been entertaining the same idea, his being unaware of Lady Macbeth's thoughts should have brought stronger surprise, along with some resistance, at least early on in their exchange.
Throughout the play, however, Stewart's Macbeth was so smooth that the Thane seemed to be uttering his words the first time. And his comic touches were delightful both for their wittiness and for their apparent spontaneity.
In the role of Lady Macbeth, Kate Fleetwood was uneven: sometimes masterful and other times awkward. For example, she didn't draw me into Lady Macbeth’s imaginary conversation before the doctor and lady-in-waiting, probably because I had the impression that Fleetwood hadn't decided on an interpretation and was still experimenting on stage. Consequently, there seemed to be two or three actresses delivering the lines in a sort of relay. Although each approach was interesting in and of itself, the incongruity made the scene somewhat clumsy.
As for Goold's adaptation, I was neutral. Updating of Shakespeare's works is sometimes logical and well-conceived, as in the case of Richard Loncraine's Richard III in 1995 on film or Robert Falls' King Lear in 2006 at the Goodman in Chicago. Goold, however, set the Scottish play in what could be, but certainly doesn't have to be, Soviet Russia. Given all the references to Scotland, the geographical problem is obvious, but the stage was nevertheless suitably spartan, cold, and bleak, and the ambience disquieting and repressive. Indeed, Macbeth's world, as Prof. Bate writes in his program notes, was one in which "secular politics stripped of religious fanaticism and prejudice" was barely even a dream. Although the setting allowed for short videos of 20th-century mass rallies and soldiers marching in lockstep, these began and ended so suddenly that they felt like filler. They might have been effective if they'd dovetailed from, and back into, the action on stage.