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<b>by William Shakespeare, directed by Matthew Kutas
HurlyBurly, Canadian Stage Theatre, Toronto
September 7-29, 2001
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“When the battle’s lost and won”
September 7th marked the arrival of a new theatre company on the Toronto scene, HurlyBurly, dedicated to the production of Shakespeare in Toronto indoors in small theatre venues. Their inaugural production is “Macbeth” in the 241-seat Canadian Stage Theatre on Berkeley Street. Toronto and environs already has several companies dedicated solely to Shakespeare but they play in schools or outdoors. The nearest company with an emphasis on Shakespeare indoors is, of course, the Stratford Festival, but its smallest venue is twice the size of the Canadian Stage Theatre. So indeed HurlyBurly has found an unoccupied niche in Toronto’s cultural gallery.
HurlyBurly’s “Macbeth” boasts a fine cast and visually striking design. Matthew Kutas’s direction, however, is strictly hit-and-miss. Kutas’s less good ideas don’t completely negate the effect of his good ideas, but they do prevent the production from reaching the kind of impact more consistent and incisive direction would have provided. This is certainly not the best “Macbeth” I have seen, but the show is far superior to Diana Leblanc’s “Macbeth” at Stratford 1999 and to Edward Gilbert‘s for Toronto Arts Productions in 1980, and it has more interesting ideas than many another at Stratford.
Among Kutas’s good ideas is playing up the friendship between Macbeth and Banquo in their first scenes. This successfully establishes the norm for human interaction from which Macbeth so rapidly falls away. Kutas has Lady Macbeth played by someone who seems half Macbeth’s age. This gives the pair’s relationship a whole new twist. Lady Macbeth’s youth and obsession with death thus link her back to Juliet in love with an aged Romeo, who has to prove his vigor by carrying our her gruesome fantasies. Kutas also has the brilliant idea of having the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth carry about a basin of water in which she washes her hands. This nicely epitomizes her mental anguish: Is she washing blood off her hands or washing her hands in blood?
The most notable aspect of the production is the inclusion of the two Hecate scenes excised from every previous production I’ve seen and never so far presented at Stratford. These scenes are normally cut because scholars agree that they are late additions not by Shakespeare to serve as an introduction to two songs for the witches (not here performed) by Thomas Middleton. Besides their dubious background, the appearances of Hecate, a goddess of the underworld in charge of sorcery, severely limits the meaning of the play. All the events of the play as we learn are all preordained by Fate. Any illusion that the characters have free will is thus discarded and they are revealed as mere puppets. This determinist view is common among Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Webster and Middleton, but without the authority of the goddess herself, the play becomes a much more ambiguous meditation on the nature of man’s free will. Nevertheless, I was delighted finally to see these scenes staged and they should give frequent theatre-goers much food for thought.
Kutas’s worst decision is to have Jamie George’s atmospheric sound design run almost without break through most of the play including during the characters’ most important soliloquies. I don’t mind soundtracks for setting moods or covering scene changes, but I do prefer to have Shakespeare’s words to the talking. The sound is sometimes so obtrusive that I couldn’t hear what was being said. This totally defeats the purpose of performing Shakespeare indoors in a small venue where otherwise a mere whisper, unaccompanied, can be heard throughout the auditorium. Among other bizarreries of the staging, including pointless scene changes and having the most long speeches delivered downstage centre to the audience, is having Lady Macbeth fall asleep on floor before intermission where she remains, until the lights fade for the first scene after intermission when she gets up and exits. “Why?” one may well ask. He has Macbeth deliver much of his address in his second scene with the witches while walking downstairs off stage. And he leaves the moveable stairway in reversed position making the final battle extremely awkward.
Carolyn M. Smith's set is a stark blood-red lacquer box with a second storey walkway at the back and the aforementioned stairway. In contrast the actors' rough, medieval outfits makes them seem like outsiders trapped within the cold, cruel mechanism of Fate. Paul Mathiesen‘s lighting is superb. The frequent fogging of the stage allows him to emphasize the way beams of light cut through it from every direction including from slits in the two side walls. James Binkley's fights, however, are rather too deliberate.
Lindsay G. Merrithew (Macbeth) gives a finely nuanced performance in the first half that had me reaching for superlatives. In the second half, however, as Macbeth sees himself trapped by Fate, Merrithew shouts almost all lines thereby losing subtlety just when the text demands more of it. When not shouting his line delivery, as in the famous "Tomorrow" speech, is oddly flat. Ruth Madoc-Jones (Lady Macbeth) is variable but in a different way. When speaking slowly she brings out the meaning in every line. Her chilling sleepwalking scene shows a Lady Macbeth, who is not merely troubled by conscience but insane. Yet when speaking rapidly she emphasizes the meter so heavily the lines become nonsense. Michael Fletcher makes Duncan a tougher, nobler king than is usual but inaccountably makes Siward seem like a elderly British twit.
Most of the actors are much more consistent. Paul Miller (Macduff) is excellent throughout, making one wish he appeared on stage more frequently. The same is true of Derek Boyes who makes Banquo's hearty good humour a perfect foil for Macbeth. Elizabeth Brown is very strong in the contrasting roles of the imperious Hecate and the very human Lady Macduff. Michael Ferguson (Porter/Doctor) clearly distinguishes his two roles, but odd direction makes his Porter's scene is more muted than usual. Patrick Garrow (Malcolm/Murderer) and newcomer Rylan Wilkie (Donalbain/Seaton) both give intelligent, well-spoken performances.
On the other hand, the tendency to speak verse as prose (also common at Stratford) afflicts both Andrew Moodie (Lennox/Menteith) and Richard Harte (Fleance/Bloody Captain). Michael Krek (Rosse) occasionally has this difficulty as well as often being inaudible. Marcia Brackett, Joanne Kelly and Tricia Lahde (the Three Witches) do as well as they can under the burden of the overly grotesque movement assigned them.
If HurlyBurly does not make the same cometlike appearance on the Toronto theatrical firmament as did Soulpepper in their inaugural production, much talent and potential are evident. This "Macbeth" with the same cast and design team needs more consistent direction and more fine-tuning to move from being merely "interesting" to "exceptional". Let's hope they make this move in their next production.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Lindsay G. Merrithew. ©2000 Merrithew Corporation.
<b> 2001-09-13</b>
<b>Macbeth</b>