Is this a dud which I see before me?
Macbeth National’s Olivier Theatre ★★☆☆☆
Rufus Norris would have been forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief this week, with the news that the National has 22 nominations at this year’s Olivier Awards – a bounceback after several lacklustre years and dire results in 2015.
Yet on the evidence of this woeful
Macbeth, the pressure is on the NT’S artistic director once again, undertaking his first Shakespeare in 25 years and seemingly restoring the curse to the Olivier that has blighted so many shows here of late.
Is this a dud which I see before me? I’m afraid it is – and it’s all the more depressing to witness because the omens looked good (Rory Kinnear and Anne-marie Duff, two of our finest actors, take the leads) and the in-house expectations were high (many of the tickets are over £50 and the show will tour in the autumn).
Yet despite committed performances from Kinnear and Duff, neither are seen to their best advantage: a pity for the former – an award-winning Hamlet and Iago here; a crying shame for the latter, who proved a commanding Joan of Arc a decade ago and an admirable stalwart in DC Moore’s Common last summer.
Rae Smith’s ugly-to-behold set is dominated by an oppressive backdrop of raven-black hangings (think seaweed crossed with shredded bin-liner) and distinguished by a sloping, shifting wooden walkway. The ambience is Mad Max meets infernal recycling pit, and a further sense of budget dystopian TV is afforded by the scavenger costuming: grubby jeans, combat gear, old coats, makeshift garments.
No production of Macbeth need conjure the specifics of 11th-century Scotland, but if a director does decide to go into modern-day apocalyptic mode, they can face a losing battle (as here) defining what is being fought over, why attention is paid to hierarchies, and how any of it matters.
Stephen Boxer’s incongruously dandyish Duncan seems to be presiding not so much over a kingdom as a localised turf-war; who cares when he gets the chop? The tragic thrust might slide almost into absurdity if the leads didn’t take it so magnetically seriously. Kinnear enlists our initial sympathy for a decent man in a nasty world becoming anguished then ire-filled as a result of his slaughter. He fumbles agonisingly in the air after that imagined dagger and blanches visibly as Banquo’s bloodied corpse zombie-staggers amok through his low-rent feast.
Duff has a compellingly pale, spectre-thin neediness, draping her leg over her hubby to entice him to dark deeds, and she makes it plain that Lady M suffers pangs of conscience from the start too. Yet the pathos of their final reunion, him cradling her self-slain corpse, here is upstaged by the grot-box cabin they’re in and whenever they’re absent, the evening loses its meagre charge.
It’s a mishmash, austerity-era Macbeth. Patrick O’kane’s Macduff is weirdly shouty. Trevor Fox’s trampish Porter has an enlarged role that subtracts laughs and adds little interest. The witches? So-so. Some of the visual flourishes – creepy facemasks, towering poles – suggest African voodoo, and yet the score is a dirge of clarinet and horn. The evening begins and ends with a gruesome simulated decapitation. I’m not saying Norris’s head should roll, but dark and bloody thoughts may seize those, like me, left mightily unmoved and unharrowed.
Until June 23. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk. NT Live on May 10