Macbeth (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Bard Abuse
Rating:
Audiences could be forgiven for turning their backs on Shakespeare.
Directors in some of our most hallowed institutions appear to be doing the same. And yet, we theatregoers keep on booking, in the hope of discovering what makes the Bard such a theatrical titan … only to face the dispiriting insights of yet another rookie director of his work.
To be fair to Wils Wilson’s Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, it’s only a partial travesty.
A lofty, experimental take on Shakespeare, it is an almost entirely Scottish-accented affair in which the famous Porter’s speech — deemed past its use-by date in the programme — has been re-written by English stand-up comedian Stewart Lee.
Before that, though, Georgia McGuinness’s design locates the mediaeval Scottish warlords in something like a lunar landscape reminiscent of a 1960s episode of Star Trek, but littered with dead birds.
A production of Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre directed by Wils Wilson
Costumes also go where no man has gone before, combining tartan kaftans with Japanese kimonos and, inexplicably, for the younger roles, spacesuit-like straitjackets.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed to discover that the monarch Duncan, and sundry thanes, are women — but this only weakens the play’s take on the violent male power fantasies exposed by the witches. It is all the more worrying that the rich diversity of this social milieu has metastasised into a monstrous Putin-esque gangster state.
After slightly meek beginnings, Reuben Joseph’s Macbeth does catch glimpses of his inner Prigozhin. He is nonetheless best at falling apart, after he imagines a dagger flashing about in mid-air, as if at Hogwarts. And did we really have to see him dragged off to his Pythonesque doom, yelping: ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’?
Still, I was glad of Northern Irish actor Valene Kane’s Lady Macbeth, who is here called ‘Gruach’ (a sickly eructation of a name, which is strangely fitting).
Kane’s licentious Lady is like an ultra-high maintenance rock chick, disappointed to discover her squeeze is having a crisis about his second album. And talking of music, Alasdair Macrae’s score is very much the show’s most distinctive and haunting feature.
It provides the soundtrack for the witches’ creative writhing, with shrieking bagpipes, gallows drumming and an immensely portentous sousaphone (a giant wrap-around tuba, which issues long, infernal, fog-horn blasts).
I’ve seen this play race past in under two hours (without an interval). But here it’s a three-hour modish variety act, with yawning gaps (literally) between scenes.
One of the chief gimmicks is ‘breakout’ segments played on a microphone, including Lee’s controversial new Porter’s speech, which Alison Peebles’ tramp-like doorkeeper utters in a deliciously abrasive Gorbals brogue.
She sneers about Tories sponsoring sanitary towels at Glyndebourne, while ingratiating herself with asides to GCSE English students, before another actor calls her sexual innuendo-laden gags ‘pathetic’.
It’s one thing for Wilson and Lee to try something fresh with the Bard, but re-writing Shakespeare is a slippery slope for the RSC, supposed guardians of his legacy.
As You Like It (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Verdict: Runin the forest
Rating:
In Ellen McDougall’s delightfully frivolous production of As You Like It at the Globe, they’ve (re)discovered that the best way to handle Shakespeare is to get the audience behind you, simply by having fun.
And, if you want to flaunt your gender fluidity, as they do here, old Bill’s joyously subversive theatricality makes him a writer who keeps on giving. And it’s a boon that the costumes for this woodland romcom are a saucy mix of Elizabethan starch and queer couture.
But what really makes the show is that it’s easy to follow and spoken loud and clear with modern street cadences, from Manchester to Yorkshire, London and North America. And each word is matched with twitches, feints and hesitations to ensure the audience hangs on every syllable.
Admittedly, a tin-eared new prologue and epilogue, which would likely make Shakespeare squirm, has been added by Travis Alabanza. Nor do they go so far as to trust the ‘hey nonino’ songs that drift through the drama like Old Man’s Beard (that’s Clematis vitalba to ye olde horticulturalists).
Instead, they draft in gay pop songs from Troye Sivan’s Bloom, to Canadian duo Tegan And Sara’s Closer and Bruno Mars’s Marry You.
Isabel Adomakoh Young plays Orlando in As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe
Nina Bowers’s American accented Rosalind, banished to the forest by her uncle, is eagerly lovelorn in her aching for Isabel Adomakoh Young as the tiny, goatee-bearded (and delightfully unlikely) wrestling champ Orlando.
Fortunately, he is similarly enamoured with her, having also been cast out of court and into the woods. And Macy-Jacob Seelochan adjudicates sweetly (and huffily) between them as Rosalind’s beloved cousin Celia.
Perhaps the most radical performance is from Alex Austin, who turns the morose woodlander Jaques into a deracinated rent boy, giving new meaning to the line ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs’.
Strutting about in tiny ‘hose’ shorts and embroidered cowboy boots, he’s a hoot — though he could have had more fun with his ‘all the world’s a stage’ speech.
Yes, there are one or two moments of queer self-congratulation. But no real complaints from me about a show where love’s labours are never lost.
Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Verdict: No laughing matter
Rating:
The Globe continues to treat its audiences like children with the trigger warning: ‘This production contains moments of violence, death and references to child loss and suicide, and features the use of stage blood, guns, and knives.’ And there was me thinking it was a cosy domestic drama.
Under Abigail Graham’s misfiring direction, however, it appears to have moved from tragedy to comedy in the canon, as no opportunity to give a side-eye or telegraph a witty line goes untaken in her modern-dress interpretation, which opened last month but runs till the end of October.
The cauldron scene, for instance, is played entirely for laughs, a food processor here in place of the boiling pot. It’s funny, but to what end?
Macbeth performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, directed by Abigail Graham
The comedy lessens, rather than heightens, the horror of the Macbeths’ descent into depravity — although the scene where Macbeth kills Young Siward produced a few gasps (including mine). Unfortunately, the rest of the murders produce a ‘meh’, as mortuary trolleys bearing corpses, or emptily awaiting their next passenger, are wheeled across the stage.
There’s one neat directorial flourish: by putting Banquo, Siward and Macduff’s sons in the spotlight, Ms Graham shows us the importance of the line of succession in this world — and it cruelly contrasts with the Macbeths’ loss of a child.
But less impactful is having the Three Witches being played by men — Callum Callaghan, Ben Caplan and Fery Roberts — who double up as Macbeth’s aides and assassins. Are they outcasts or insiders? It’s difficult to tell.
Max Bennett’s Macbeth is unconvincing as either hero or villain, while Matti Houghton as Lady Macbeth is equally bland, and even her ‘mad’ scenes fail to elicit our sympathy. Few actors get the chance to shine, except perhaps for Mr Callaghan’s Porter.
This is a muddled production — not helped by Ti Green’s almost empty set, inexplicably wrapped in creased grey material — that adds little to our understanding of the play.