THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
Almeida Theatre, London, until November 27. Tickets: 020 7359 4404
A wheelbarrow filled with boots, an electric wheelchair and a portable oxygen cylinder furnish the stage. There is a bucket of blood with which the actors can smear themselves. Director Yael Farber’s theatrical imagery is far from subtle.
Macbeth is ripe with dark symbolism and to pile on more imagery is excessive. The satanic ritual of his coronation is more Dennis Wheatley than Shakespeare and flooding the stage with ‘cleansing’ water is just old hat.
I can live with the three witches strolling around in black power suits but turning Banquo’s ghost scene into a comic interlude and having Lady Macbeth witness the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children are indefensible departures from the text.
The big draw is US/Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, familiar from films such as Little Women and Hanna, making her UK stage debut as Lady Macbeth. Girlish, lightly sexualised and seemingly at odds with the testosteronefuelled brutes that surround her, she underplays to a degree where she almost evaporates. By throwing away too many lines, she conveys little of the tensile strength of Lady Macbeth’s ambition.
While William Gaunt (Duncan) and Michael Abubakar (Malcolm) acquit themselves well in their roles, the remaining cast – including James McArdle’s sturdy Macbeth – is urged to go over the top into snarling, screaming, snot-dribbling hysteria. Consequently there is no sense of the fatalism that grips Macbeth from the moment he is told that he cannot be killed by “man born of woman”.
Unnecessarily extended to three hours, this lacks the momentum that can make Macbeth such a terrifying experience.
Shakespeare can cope with any amount of tinkering but check out Joel Coen’s new film with Denzel Washington to see how it should be done. His plays will survive long after this production has been forgotten.