This is more like Four Witches and a Funeral
Macbeth Shakespeare’s Globe
‘What will they have got up to this time?” I muttered to another critic ahead of Iqbal Khan’s staging of Macbeth at the Globe, which under Emma Rice’s new artistic directorship appears hell-bent on bucking traditionalist wisdoms. “I bet there’ll be four witches.”
I wish I’d put money on it. The opening sequence confronts us with the sight of four women in black dresses, faces obscured by widows’ veils. Their opening lines are eerily sung as they writhe away, manipulating hewn-off hands, and rouse from the dead, like a puppet, the prone, bloodied figure of the captain who brings news of victory to King Duncan. Is it a health-and-safety issue (four are required to lift him)? Is the extra apparition Hecate, queen of the witches? In any event, the line “When shall we three meet again?” remains – like coherence doesn’t matter.
There’s plenty more like that. The murderous Macbeths (Ray Fearon and Tara Fitzgerald) apparently have a child – so a poor youngster is required to haunt the action for much of the evening, staring at a bowl, his only plaything. Sure, Lady M says “I have given suck…” but later on doesn’t Macduff, contemplating the slaughter of his own “pretty ones”, rail: “He has no children”? Not here. A rewrite (“You have no children”) makes the line a recrimination against Malcolm for being insufficiently sensitive.
The succession issue is thus made more complicated than we had supposed: the ominous final image is of the Macbeth child standing before the throne – the victorious Malcolm be warned (and the Bard be damned).
By this stage, I had pretty much ceased to care. This production should be called Four Witches and a Funeral – the funeral being for a text that’s strangled and battered by indifferent to terrible verse-speaking.
The chief culprit is Lady Macbeth. Prone to slapping her man, Fitzgerald resembles a supply teacher drafted in at short notice who can barely be bothered to raise her voice. She sounds like she’s sleepwalking even before she’s sleepwalking. As a zany-acting Duncan, Sam Cox inserts umpteen pauses into every speech. And while Fearon’s imposingly brawny Macbeth restores some semblance of grace and beauty to what we hear, he sounds like he’s in another production, even from another era. His is a declamatory Shakespeare – too little comes from the psychological interior.
But I blame Khan. He lets the pace drag, has countenanced an ugly design, and while the loud, Celtic-moody music casts a spell, it also overwhelms. There are also too many notes of jarring comedy (this is the first time I’ve heard Lady Macduff ’s abrupt line “Sirrah, your father’s dead” get a big laugh). Nadia Albina’s narky Porter steals the show with an engagingly feisty and naturally funny turn, but there’s not much to steal.
Until Oct 1. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com