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by William Shakespeare, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 30-November 5, 2016

“A poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” (Act 5)

There is absolutely no reason to see Macbeth at Stratford this year.  After A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth is the most frequently staged play at the Festival, so if you miss it one year you need not wait long for it to come around again.  The current production is already Stratford’s third this century after one directed by Des McAnuff in 2009 and one by John Wood in 2004.  If the current Macbeth featured an bold new insight into the play or especially fine performances, it might be worth seeing.  Neither is the case.  The production is lacklustre at best and is woefully miscast.

The one twist Cimolino gives this Macbeth is to make Macbeth and his Lady so young.  Ian Lake and Krystin Pellerin may be in their thirties but they look and act as if they were in their twenties.  Lake and Pellerin may have been cast according to the bogus idea that young people only want to see young people on stage.  (Tell that to the young people who packed the audience of The Dance of Death in London in 2003 starring 64-year-old Ian McKellen.)  The problem with a young Macbeth couple is that it lessens the urgency of their wish to kill Duncan.  With an aged Duncan in Joseph Ziegler and with the thanedom of Cawdor so easily won, the Macbeths are young enough to think that the witches’ prophesies would come true on their own over time. 

With a Macbeth and wife middle-aged or older, we can understand the sense they have that they must act now or never to fulfil a prophecy.  That was certainly the case with Patrick Stewart, the best Macbeth I have ever seen, when he played the role in 2007 at age 67.  A young Macbeth couple has hardly had time to long for more power than they already have.  An older Macbeth couple has a fruitless life to look back on and can see power as a substitute for the children they do not have.  One might be able to understand a young Macbeth couple if the danger of murder acted as some sort of aphrodisiac, but Cimolino does not take that direction at all. 

Under Cimolino’s direction and with Julie Fox’s dingy all-grey design, Lake also has little stage presence.  Often you have to look around the stage to see where he is – hardly what you expect with a title character.  His slouched posture and football player’s walk make him appear more like a servant than a lord.  His interpretation of Shakespeare’s verse consists mostly of capturing the general mood of a speech rather than in conveying a knowledge of what every word means and why it’s there.  This lack of sensitivity to the language is evident in the strange pauses he takes between a subject and verb or an adjective and a noun.  In this production, Macbeth’s famous lines about  life  as “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” is embarrassingly all too pertinent. 

Krystin Pellerin fares even worse.  In her first appearance in the letter scene of Act 1, she reads about the witches’ prophesy while full of dimples and smiles as if she were in Anne of Green Gables.  The ability to conjure up evil is totally beyond her.  The worst she can seem is like a peevish schoolgirl, even in the scenes where she berates Macbeth for not being manly enough.  Lake at least can convey the mood of a given speech.  Pellerin often cannot do even that.  She, too, is so lacking in presence that when she entered to welcome Duncan on his arrival at the castle, I assumed she was one of the Lady Macbeth’s servants and that Lady Macbeth would appear later.

The casting of two damp squibs as the most infamous couple in Shakespeare is enough to sink the play even if the rest were fantastic.  But the rest is not.  Cimolino has no clear view of the efficacy of the Witches.  In their first invocation, the First Witch (Brigit Wilson) acts, via formant pitch shifting, as if she is possessed by a demon which would suggest they do have a real connection to supernatural power.  Yet, Cimolino is at pains to make Macbeth’s second visit to the Witches appear as if it were a dream.  He concludes the play with the Witches turning up at Malcolm’s coronation as King of Scotland.  If they are there to gloat that their prediction was right, then they have been unwitting agents of providence rather than evil.  If they are there to ensnare the new king, then their prophesy that Banquo’s heirs will be kings is false.  In any case, it hardly helps create an atmosphere of fear when the acting of the three Weird Sisters – Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Lanise Antoine Shelley – is so over the top that they come across as a comic parody of the Witches. 

The Porter’s scene after Duncan’s murder is usually taught in high schools as an example of “comic relief”.  This does not have to be so, as John Wood showed in his 2004 production which was all the stronger for not relieving the build-up of tension.  Here, Cimolino goes with the high school notion and not only has Cyrus Lane play the part as a clichéd drunk and play it directly to the audience but he makes the Porter a modern character by having him imagine blowing up his enemies.  This is also odd since Cimolino has set the action in a pre-medieval period before Europeans used gunpowder.  

Other less than effective performances include Yared Antoine as Malcolm.  His uninflected voice makes Malcolm’s testing scene with Macduff in Act 5 so tedious and passionless that it’s hard to see how Macduff could ever be taken in by it.  As Duncan, Joseph Ziegler conveys the king’s feebleness but none of his vigour or regal nature.  Sarah Afful is a rather confused Lady Macduff, who is outshone in acting by nine-year-old Oliver Neudorf as Young Macduff who not only has clearer diction but, unlike too many of the adult actors, actually seems to understand what he is saying.

Cimolino takes an oddly genteel approach to directing a play known for his horrors.  Beginning with the execution of the Thane of Cawdor (not in the original) that he uses to begin the play and with every subsequence scene involving violence, Cimolino calls for a blackout just before the fatal blow is struck.  He even has Macbeth killed off stage.  While this is a welcome change from previous directors who have oversaturated the play with gore, one wonders what this fastidiousness is supposed to represent since it is not enough to transform the play into a classical tragedy where no violence occurred on stage.

Cimolino does achieve two technical coups de théâtre.  After the blackout on the empty stage indicating Banquo’s murder, the lights immediately come up on the riotous banquet at the Macbeths in full swing*.  In a reverse move, the Macbeth’s second visit to the Witches ends with a blackout followed immediately with lights up on Macbeth prone on a bare stage.  Cimolino also staged the banquet scene of Act 3 quite deftly and offers the novelty of having Duncan’s ghost appear among the guests as well as Banquo’s. 

There are some design peculiarities, however.  When the Witches show Macbeth the line of kings descending from Banquo, they all wear crowns of antlers in a nod to television’s Games of Thrones, perhaps, though not to Scotland.  Also, the Forest of Dunsinane seems to be a Christmas tree farm, at least judging by the six-foot-high specimens Malcolm’s troops carried in front of them.   

Ultimately, the real stars of the production are Michael Walton’s wildly varied use of lighting and Thomas Ryder Payne’s eerie soundscape that more than anything create an atmosphere of magic and foreboding.  That atmosphere is so strong that the speeches of most of the actors, especially the Macbeths, seem weak by comparison. 

It is all very well to allow young actors to essay major roles, but to do so when they are manifestly not ready does no one any favours.  It is not good for the actors to feel out of their depth, it is not good for the play since its depths go unplumbed and it is not good for the audience who come to see authoritative performances, not weak ones.  This is not the worse Macbeth Stratford has ever staged, but it is one of the least engaging.  All we need do is wait about five years and hope that the inevitable next production will be better.  

      

*Note: On May 31 faithful reader Dr. Howard Clarke pointed out that Robin Phillips made the same switch from darkness for Banquo’s murder to the sudden light of the banquet scene in progress in his production of Macbeth starring Douglas Rain and Maggie Smith in 1978.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Brigit Wilson, Ian Lake, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Lanise Antoine Shelley;Ian Lake and Krystin Pellerin; Michael Blake. ©2016 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.