Macbeth cursed by theatrical overkill
Macbeth RSC, Stratford-upon-avon
‘Oh, woe is me, T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” Let’s borrow from Hamlet to describe this lamentable Macbeth, the second dismal account of the Scottish play from a major subsidised theatre we’ve had to suffer in a fortnight.
What’s alarming is that both this revival by Polly Findlay for the RSC and Rufus Norris’s for the National did sell-out business at the box office prior to opening night. By my reckoning, excluding the cinema screenings, the Barbican run and the NT’S autumn tour, that’s potentially around 130,000 underwhelmed punters.
While they take different approaches (albeit over-using the Porter, here a shuffling janitor with bolshie shades of union reps past), they both suffer similar basic problems. They leave their leading actors – in this case Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack – looking stranded and awkward.
And the worlds they conjure are beset by a lack of coherence and bedevilled, for all their surface modishness, by a frustrating air of irrelevance. Given the rise of vicious autocrats today, you’d think directors would never have had it easier pointing up chilling parallels, but this is the cursed hour of the selfregarding, look-at-me Macbeth.
To be fair, the first ostentatious directorial flourish isn’t a bad one. Findlay – who has just had success with David Eldridge’s Beginning, about a couple whose romance starts with the premise of wanting a child – presents the witches as young girls in polka dot onesies, hugging plastic dollies in a sinister parody of motherhood. Kiddies with supernatural powers are a horror film staple – and there’s a neat The Shiningstyle synchronicity to the way the weird sisters slowly advance across the stage, turn and stare, their voices eerie, babyish. That said, they’re quite sugar and spice and all things nice, and something unkind in me whispers that they rather look as if they’ve wandered in from a Matilda audition.
Eccleston (forever bound in the Who’s Who of Doctor Whos) arrives with his face gore-smeared, a beanie on his head, martial in bearing (surprisingly stout for one so angular). He gives his lines the gruff northerner treatment, the odd ray of a smile escaping his stormy visage. You catch, early, a crumpling uncertainty – he hugs and worships at the feet of Cusack’s Lady M, who’s unusually likeable if scamperingly neurotic – yet he insufficiently communicates growing isolation amid the character’s darkening predicament. In his soliloquies, he’s often usefully addressing us rather than tumbling out his thoughts, and even in the most affecting scene when, alone, slumped on the floor, he delivers Act V’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, it’s as if the ideas have long occurred to him.
When he’s at his most vital, the mise-en-scène overkill conspires against this RSC debutant. Sticking him in full regalia while seating him in a black leather Mastermind-style “throne” looks absurd; the Banquohaunted feast fiasco is about as scary as Scooby-doo; and it’s really hard to look like you’re up against it when you’ve been positioned next to an office water-cooler.
That’s as nothing, though, to Findlay and her designer Fly Davis’s pièce de résistance – a digital clock that counts two hours down from the physically frail Duncan’s death to Macbeth’s mechanically perfunctory dispatch at the hands of Edward Bennett’s portly (but smartly understated) Macduff. This distracting device sits beneath a monumental gallery area around which are beamed, in a Brechtian and teacherly fashion, pull-out quotes from the play.
My son, well-versed in Macbeth thanks to a recent GCSE, came out even more enamoured of the version starring Patrick Stewart, as directed by Rupert Goold in 2007, easily available on DVD. Enough said. Until Sept 18. Tickets: 01789 403493; rsc.org.uk; then at the Barbican Theatre Oct 15-Jan 18