Credit: Tristram Kenton
At 2477 lines Macbeth is one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, and the shortest tragedy. Presented at the Young Vic in 2hrs without an interval, the spooky and bloody text has been further slashed, and yet it feels slow. The recent film comes in at about the same length and also drags like the hypermetrical ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. They both supplement their abridged texts with visual and aural feasts: the blood-red vistas of the Scottish highlands, the austere silence of the castle corridors in the Weinstein film, and the hip-hop inspired dance of the present Carrie Cracknell/Lucy Guerin production. I thoroughly enjoy Cracknell’s collaboration with Guerin on Medea at the National Theatre, and found the chorus’ jerky, unsettling movement contributed well to the action. Here the shapewear-clad witches lead movement that is meant to take us to a similarly otherworldly place, but the dance is never eerily synchronized or frighteningly chaotic. Rather they seem like three young women rehearsing the motions before they’ve been given their costumes.
One of the vices that Malcolm uses in his description of Macbeth is ‘luxurious’:
I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name.
And I think both these productions of Macbeth are guilty of that sin. I reproduce the lines here in part because neither version retains them, both cutting to Ross bringing news to Macduff that Macbeth has killed his wife and children. In the context of the film’s focus on Michael Fassbender’s intensely psychological portrait of grief and greed (and a typically ‘good’ Duncan) this was almost excusable. But one of the great flourishes of Cracknell & Guerin’s production is the presentation of Duncan (Nicholas Burns) as a near mafia-like tyrant. The nature of Macbeth’s violent overthrow changes in such a context, and Malcolm and Macduff’s reflection on the nature of kingship (through Malcolm feigning more horrifying personal lusts than Macbeth’s) becomes even more relevant:
But there’s no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness. Your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons, and your maids could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o’erbear
That did oppose my will. Better Macbeth
Than such an one to reign.
It’s a tough scene to get right. But without this discussion of good kingship, this production of Macbeth appears as a series of brutal executions, kept hidden in the underground concrete of Lizzie Clahan’s set, hope and light disappearing hand-in-hand to a vanishing point like a dying cathode ray tube. We need to hear Macduff cry “O Scotland, Scotland!” before he laments the death of his “pretty chickens and their dam”. Otherwise the perpetrators of the final actions of the play aren’t meaningfully differentiated from those of the first: one plastic-wrapped head is held up by Macbeth at the beginning of the play, and then his own head is bagged and held aloft by another soldier at the end. A hopeless circle of violence, which makes Macbeth’s ambition and overthrow feel more a chronicle than a tragedy. Interesting.
John Heffernan’s Macbeth is hard to accept as a warlike butcher but he excels once he has become the nervous king. He is extensively and cleverly haunted by Prasanna Puwanarajah’s strong Banquo, who also takes many of Seyton and the Doctor’s lines in Act V. In response to Macbeth’s query about curing his wife’s psychological distress, the ‘him’ in “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself,” was never more keenly spat. He is haunted too by a striking Lady Macbeth in Anna Maxwell Martin, who seems to be out for power of her own in a way that most Lady Macbeths aren’t. When she says “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be / What thou art promised”, it really feels like she’s talking about herself. Watching her husband falter in the execution and fall apart in the banquet scene allows her own doubt and fear to seep in. These engaging portraits of Macbeth’s two closest ties ground the centre of the play, even as a potential fascinating interpretation gets lost in murky concrete tunnels, obscured by dance.
