Murder madness and MAYHEM
All served up from a pop-up theatre in a York car park!
YORK has a flag-flying new Shakespearean theatre to boast about.
It is an open-air, Elizabethaneffect, temporary structure which has colonised one of the city’s car parks and it will be there until the start of September offering four productions — Romeo & Juliet, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth.
I caught that last one on Wednesday in the shadow of York Castle’s historic mound, Clifford’s Tower.
This is a solid, traditional Macbeth, far preferable to the ones recently served up by the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Richard Standing makes a manly, clearspoken Thane and Rina Mahoney a tall, well-dressed Lady Macbeth.
Paul Hawkyard’s Macduff is a bear of a bloke, not a figure you would want to encounter in one-on-one sword combat. The look on his face after he has exacted revenge on his enemy is the beaming delight of a bulldog after a four-sausage lunch.
Old King Duncan (Fine Time Fontayne) is snowy-haired, a politician glad to have others do his fighting for him.
MR
FONTAYNE doubles as the porter, splendidly phlegmy and pantaloon’d. The costume code is roughly period — swords, squarehead axes and skean dhus, but no kilts or bagpipes — and the gender-blind/colour-blind tweaking is kept to a reasonable level, Edith Kirkwood stepping in at a late hour to play Ross with admirable crispness. You sense that director Damian Cruden is driven by the objective (shocking idea this) of telling the story for the benefit of his audience rather than trying to make political points while flourishing his directorial ingenuity at the same time.
That may be true of the entire engaging enterprise of this Rose Theatre. The project, created by Yorkshire impresario James Cundall, is unstuffy, interesting, fun. It wears any educational purpose lightly.
From a distance the pop-up theatre looks a little like a scaleddown medieval castle. It is less toothrottingly ersatz than London’s Globe — the structure does not disguise its metal scaffolds and the seats, thank goodness, are not those awful benches they have at the Globe.
The Rose may have a front pit for groundlings, whose space is frequently invaded by the actors, but it has no heritage-theatre hang- ups about using electric lights. The music is live: woodwind, cello and much drumming ring forth from a minstrels’ gallery.
The groundlings tittered at the opening sword-fight scene but by the end they were revelling in the blood and guts.
The one disappointment? Those darn witches, one of whom is played by a man. Director Cruden seems reluctant to take them seriously and the same three actors are used, confusingly, as the thuggish murderers employed by Macbeth to slaughter his rivals and their families.
Memo to directors: if in doubt about the evil sisters, play it oldschool with hags and a cauldron.
Outside the theatre is an area of bars and shops, a Shakespearean garden with white roses (of course), exhibits about Elizabethan killing habits, and some strolling players who keep the crowds entertained pre-show.
The Rose looks a fine addition to York’s summer tourism offering. Mr Cundall has poured a fortune into this unusual venture. In the words of this play, he has screwed his courage to the sticking place.
At the end of the summer he himself should take a curtain call.