Stratford gives us a boldly sinister take on the Scottish Play
Antoni Cimolino pulls off some chilling surprises in production of the Shakespeare classic
The 2016 season at the Stratford Festival has begun and so far it’s the season of the witch.
The weird sisters are fiercer than ever in Antoni Cimolino’s season-opening production of Macbeth, which is a bold and brutal take on the Scottish king’s tragic tale that fully embraces the play’s supernatural themes. In fact, it seemingly places the entire story within them.
Forgoing any suggestion of a regal Scottish castle or barren battlefields, Cimolino’s stage, designed by Julie Fox, is cov- ered with moss and rocks while the entrances are framed with spindly, twiggy trees. Michael Walton’s lighting design is used sparingly, leaving much of the action in relative darkness enhanced by live torches. Though Banquo and Macbeth seem to escape their first meeting with the three weird sisters at the play’s start, on this stage the characters never really leave the witches’ territory in the woods. And so the fearsome women are able to pop in and out as they please, physically or mystically, and they do so in some truly chilling surprises that Cimolino pulls off with his own theatrical magic.
And these are not witches you’d want joining you at dinner. Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Lanise Antoine Shelley are a powerful trio and look positively terrifying in Fox’s costumes (with a special thumbs up to those opaque white contacts on Shelley, a very effective detail). If you expect the thrill of Macbeth to come from the sword fights, which certainly don’t disappoint here, the witches’ incantations are the real spectacle.
Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design gives Wilson’s spells a hellish depth. While some smaller choices, like adding a paranormal sound effect to Macbeth’s dagger apparition, come off a bit cheesy, it all builds to the highlight of Macbeth’s second visit to the witches and their premonitions of a man not born of woman and Birnam Wood travelling to Dunsinane.
That scene is also the unexpected closing of Act 1. Cimolino’s flair for spectacular images works better here than we’ve seen yet.
It’s guaranteed to send you into intermission with a chill down your spine.
Cimolino also plays with the opening of the play, beginning the production with a battlefield killing of a soldier.
In the next scene, that soldier is hanging by his wrist in the witches’ lair, his blood used in their first spell.
This trick either positions the witches as scavengers, finding ingredients as they go along, or more likely the soldiers as players in the witches’ plan.
In this Macbeth, any human that comes into contact with the weird sisters is clearly not in control.
This is undoubtedly the case for Ian Lake’s Macbeth, a younger, burlier, more impulsive version of Macbeth than we’re used to seeing.
There’s no attempt to make his ambitions and murderous plots heroic.
Lake’s youth against Joseph Ziegler’s King Duncan makes their pairing more of a father and son dynamic, and Lake eagerly soaks up his praise but turns jealous toward Prince Malcolm (Antoine Yared) on a dime.
He petulantly refuses to hug Banquo’s son Fleance because the little boy was prophesied to be king.
And his mind is so completely lost by the end of the first act that it’s hard to believe anyone is still following his orders in the second, a sombre but fast-paced fallout from his actions.
Lake’s grasp on Macbeth’s latter monologues, when he’s less consumed by greed and magic, and more in tune with reality, starts to weaken.
But Macbeth’s arrogance at that point lets Lake deliver some great deadpan one-liners.
If this Macbeth is unusual, so is his wife. Krystin Pellerin is a standout as Lady Macbeth, whose “Unsex me here” speech is an evil-minded plea to dark spirits before a heated reunion with her husband.
But her inner schemes are hidden behind a sweet, ingenue face and de- meanour that plays to her advantage.
She demurely kisses Duncan’s cheek to welcome him to her home and faints at the news of his death, using charm instead of cunning to set the plan in action.
With so much darkness in Cimolino’s Macbeth, the beams of light are harder to see in the heroes Malcolm and Macduff (Michael Blake).
Macduff’s fury after the death of his family (a sweet Sarah Afful makes a fast impression as Lady Macduff in a charismatic exchange with young Macduff, Oliver Neudorf ) comes through in his final battle with Mac- beth, but the character is stiff with composure compared to the frenzy that is Lake’s villain.
A much needed breath of comic relief comes through in Cyrus Lane’s Porter, who gives the inebriated servant a contemporary, almost Matthew McConaughey-like drawl and a Johnny Carson-like “Heeeeeere’s the farmer!”
Cimolino and the Stratford Festival took a gamble here and it worked out. Audience members will be pleased to watch the world he’s created, but will likely keep an eye out for sinister-looking trios afterward.