Review
MACBETH
Theatre Calgary
Starring Jim Mezon, Caroline Cave, David McNally and Christopher Hunt
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Christopher Newton
Runs until February 26
Max Bell Theatre (Epcor Centre)
If the Shaw Festival did Shakespeare, it would look like Christopher Newton’s Macbeth at Theatre Calgary.
Newton, the Shaw’s artistic director for more than two decades, approaches this medieval tragedy with a fin de siècle and early-20th-century sensibility. The trappings suggest the First World War, Shaw Festival vet Jim Mezon is a Mussolini-like Macbeth, and the play’s Jacobean spookiness, with its witches and apparitions, is treated instead in the low-key style of the Edwardian period, which was the heyday of the subtle, psychological ghost story.
And Newton also takes a somewhat Shavian attitude to the story – his Macbeth is more about the mind than the emotions. A key line in this version comes immediately after the Scottish thane has butchered the king – the first terrible step in his brief, bloody career – and his wife-accomplice (Caroline Cave) urges him to stop brooding about it and wash up. "To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself," he agrees. But Macbeth is a thinking man, and how do you reconcile what you’ve done with your conscience? How do you sleep at night?
You don’t, of course – Macbeth is, among other things, the great play about insomnia. Having "murdered sleep" along with their monarch, Macbeth and his wife are doomed to a perpetual uneasiness of mind that finally drives her to madness and leaves him a haunted ruin. As played by Mezon, Macbeth at the end is a hollow-eyed hulk, "aweary of the sun," longing to be snuffed out yet still running on autopilot. He’s so ready to die that he can barely bring himself to say, "Lay on, Macduff" and finish that final swordfight.
That isn’t to say there isn’t passion here. If Mezon’s Macbeth is a burly, bald-headed soldier (he also looks a little like Patton), Cave’s Lady Macbeth is a young, sexy woman with a fixated, agitated personality that’s evident in everything she does, from the way she plots the king’s murder to the way she violently embraces her husband. It’s no surprise that she ends up a somnambulant case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, rubbing those imaginary bloodstains from her hands over and over again.
After the Macbeths become walking shadows in the second half, the play’s emotional interests shift to Macduff, whose desire to avenge his slaughtered family gives the military drive to unseat Macbeth a personal angle. The play’s most moving scene (at least for anyone with children) is Macduff’s dazed reaction to the news that his wife and kids have been put to the sword, and David McNally’s expressive performance goes some distance towards plumbing the deep chasm of horror and anguish that opens up in the man as he tries to comprehend such an incalculable loss. Harry Judge, meanwhile, gives us a handsome, unlikable Malcolm who utters a lame "Merciful heaven!" at the news but clearly has no idea what Macduff is going through, counselling him to "Dispute it like a man" – and receiving, from Macduff, Shakespeare’s classic putdown of macho stoicism: "But I must also feel it as a man."
There has always been a temptation for directors to equate Shakespeare’s tyrants with modern dictators – long before Ian McKellen’s famous Hitler-like Richard III of the 1990s, Orson Welles in 1937 staged a legendary Julius Caesar set in Fascist Italy – but Newton’s use of the conceit is consistent and effective. This is a spare but striking production, with a cold, grey look that recalls ancient photographs of war-torn Europe (or maybe just a typical winter in Scotland). David Boechler’s raw-boned set, seemingly built of concrete, steel girders and corrugated iron, is transformed from a battlefield to a palace with the addition of colourful draperies and a few chandeliers, but retains a sense of the vast and bleak. The three witches (Renée Amber, Christy Greene and Belinda Cornish), looking like wartime scavengers, emerge from the trenches and use a smoking bomb crater for their cauldron. Rifles and handguns are fired, but Macbeth and Macduff resort to their not-yet-obsolete sabres for the climactic duel. And Mezon’s bullet-head isn’t the only thing that makes you think Mussolini – when Macduff talks of putting the defeated Macbeth on public exhibit, "as our rarer monsters are," you recall how the dead body of Il Duce was strung up by the heels in a Milan piazza to be mocked.
In keeping with the air of realism, Newton underplays the supernatural side of the tragedy; this Macbeth’s visions remain in his mind, suggested only by Kevin Lamotte’s strange shafts of lighting and Peter Moller’s soundscape of disembodied voices. However, he goes too far in underplaying Macbeth’s violence – admittedly often overdone (remember Roman Polanski’s laughably gory film version?) but still a crucial ingredient that, used judiciously, adds to the play’s growing sense of horror.
But Newton succeeds brilliantly with what can be one of the play’s most jarring episodes, the drunken porter’s comic routine – humorous patter aimed squarely at the groundlings that today can seem a tedious, ludicrous diversion coming right on the heels of Duncan’s murder. Newton places the scene in the inventive hands of Christopher Hunt, whose porter becomes a tipsy life of the party, entertaining a bunch of drunken soldiers with "knock, knock" jokes and charades. Not only is Hunt hilarious, but the routine fulfils its original function perfectly, giving the audience an amusing breather before taking us back to the tragedy.
Overall, the staging is taut; Macbeth is the shortest and most straightforward of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, and Newton makes it feel even leaner and more direct. He gets confident, if sometimes colourless, performances from the supporting players in his cast of 18, with only a few weak spots (such as the witches’ muffled, muddled delivery) and one minor-character surprise: Belinda Cornish’s heartfelt performance as Lady Macbeth’s solicitous lady in waiting.
We haven’t seen a lot of Shakespeare at Theatre Calgary over the years, and what we have seen has often been poorly conceived or just plain bad. And of course, Macbeth is notoriously unlucky, so we might well have expected the worst. Instead, ironically enough, TC’s take on the cursed "Scottish play" turns out to be blessedly good. |
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