A flimsy, feminist take on Shakespeare
Theatre Othello/macbeth Lyric Hammersmith ★★★★★
At the end of next week, Sean Holmes will depart the Lyric Hammersmith after nine years as artistic director of the most important subsidised theatre in west London. A round of measured applause is due: he has left the building battleready for the 21st century. In 2015 it completed a transformational four-year £16.5 million facelift and extension. That has now been further augmented with the refurb of the Victorian-era auditorium: there’s fancy new seating and a meticulous “refresh” all over. In a nice touch, the “consecratory” comic poem that the great Lillie Langtry spoke on stage when Frank Matcham’s marvel opened in 1895, was recited again by another actress (Kayla Meikle) on opening night; past and present shook hands.
No grounds for complaint, then, so far as the plush, velvety-yet-modern ambience is concerned. But what about the actual programming? Inevitably it suffered a dislocating effect from the building works – something that Holmes endeavoured to capitalise on by creating a pop-up strand called “secret theatre”.
To my mind, whenever Holmes has taken a more conventional approach, as with his 2009 regime-launching revival of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians (which seemed to herald an ongoing exploration of plays from the Sixties and Seventies – once his forte) or the 2015 re-opening production of Bugsy Malone, a burst of juvenile joy, the Lyric has burned brightest.
But a few undeniably assured modern-classic revivals aside (Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 2010, Edward Bond’s Saved the following year), too often it has looked as if the Lyric has been chasing youth appeal, in thrall to experimental avant-gardery but seldom actually mustering anything that proved particularly new or daring.
I’m afraid that’s the disappointed verdict again for this buy-one-get-one-free double-bill of Othello and Macbeth, compressed into a just-about manageable two and a half hours or so. The design (by Basia Binkowska) is award-winning; the conceit (from director Jude Christian) pertinently feminist and yet flimsy.
At the end of a desperately truncated Othello (performed without Iago’s soliloquies and in front of a grim metal wall), the brutalised and slain women of the play – Kirsten Foster’s (admittedly terrific) Desdemona, Kezrena James’s Bianca and Melissa Johns’s Emilia – defiantly rise up to don camouflage jackets and transform themselves into the three witches of Macbeth – as if their vengeful spirits have vowed to make war on toxic masculinity. That allows the “weird sisters” to flit more about the action, watching proceedings from a high-up walkway, creating eerie, scraping sounds as they run fingers along wires. But given that the storylines remain distinct (saving the odd bit of interpolated text) it feels as if the thematic bridge between the two worlds is rickety at best.
At times it all goes a bit Reduced Shakespeare Company, without the laughs. The modern-dressed company is so cut to the bone that in Othello, Roderigo has to be insinuated offstage. Meanwhile, in the superior Macbeth, performed on an abattoir-like expanse of black and white tiles, Sandy Grierson (who plays Macbeth) must multitask – doing away with Banquo himself, as there are no assassins to do his bidding.
Despite the hurtling momentum, the verse-speaking is remarkably lucid and, in a school parties way, keeping students up to speed, it serves a useful enough purpose. Yet for all the commendable ambition of this unusual mash-up, the broader question – “Why bother?” – remains hanging like a dagger in the air.