Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Des McAnuff
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 1-October 31, 2009
"Toil and Trouble"
The Stratford Festival’s tenth production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” features superb performances by Colm Feore in the title role and by Yanna McIntosh as his scheming wife. Unfortunately, these performances are trapped in the context of director Des McAnuff’s noisy, superficial production. While McAnuff holds off on his love of showiness for its own sake in the first half, tricks and gimmickry return with a vengeance in the second half destroying what subtlety the first half manages to achieve.
McAnuff has relocated the action from Scotland of the 11th century to “a mythic mid-20th-century Africa” as he calls it in the programme. He does so because of “the extreme violence” we have witnessed there over the past 50 years. This is not Darfur or Rwanda because Duncan, the head of state, is white as are his two successors. Since his Banquo is black and Banquo’s progeny are fated to rule, McAnuff could be pursuing some critique of colonialism, but this line is barely pursued and confounded by his black Lady Macbeth. And if the location is in Africa why is their a Scottish flag behind Malcolm at the end? McAnuff also claims the setting will make sense of the Weird Sisters as “practitioners of pre-Christian religion” who “deserve to be treated with dignity.” That’s all very well, but why is one of the three practitioners of the native religion white? Overall, the new setting causes more confusion than clarification. Guns and grenades makes lots of noise but don’t create the person man-to-man struggles the action requires. No wonder McAnuff has the actors ditch these weapons at the climax to use machetes.
Except for the flurry of explosions that open the play, McAnuff’s direction is surprisingly restrained and he actually seems to encourage Feore and McIntosh to explore their characters, although Michael Roth’s almost continuous soundtrack that veers between “Psycho” and “Mission Impossible” is a constant annoyance with its needless underlining of mood. In the second half, McAnuff lays on the gimmickry. Four video screens appear in Macbeth’s office, apparently attached to surveillance cameras, but neither Macbeth nor anyone else ever looks at them except when they form part of the witches’ prophesies. The witches‘ cauldron also is a horizontal video screen programmed to make ripples and change colour with each added ingredient. Then McAnuff treats us to a deafening helicopter flyover, rope-descending paratroopers, more bombs and finally a jeep. The show’s closing music is an upbeat rock song as if it’s time to forget the tragedy and get ready to party. It’s a Hollywood blockbuster mindset that ill suits the subject.
All the special effects seem to cover up McAnuff’s inability to answer some of the essential questions the play poses. What power, if any, do the Weird Sisters have? The best productions, such as Rupert Goold’s for the Chichester Festival in 2007, suggest none. McAnuff seems to head that way in Macbeth’s first encounter with them where they look like refugees looting dead bodies. But in the second half their bloodshot eyes flicker over the surveillance images and their visions appear there. So which is it and how does their “pre-Christian religion” have such a high-tech influence?
Worse, while Feore and McIntosh are free to explore their characters, there is no chemistry between them. There should be exhilaration as well as dread following Duncan’s murder. McAnuff brings on a bed, but does nothing with it. Macbeth and his wife don’t even sit on it at the same time. There is so little passion between them that we wonder why Macbeth should even lament his queen’s passing. Other dramaturgical errors ruin the effect of other scenes. McAnuff bizarrely intercuts the massacre of Macduff’s wife and children with the testing scene between Macduff and Malcolm, thus distracting out attention from both scenes at once.
In spite of all this, the integrity of a number of fine performances shines through the murk of McAnuff’s direction. Colm Feore, despite looking haggard and unwell, gives one of his finest performances. He has got rid of some of his former habits of delivery to give a clear, deep reading of the text. Macbeth’s existential crisis has seldom been portrayed with such simplicity. He may be a fine soldier but he is a follower not a leader whose role is to defend the order of things. The witches‘ prophesy awakens new thoughts that he uneasily brushes aside. Only when Lady Macbeth ridicules his manhood and in effect becomes his new commander, does he give in to his baser side. From that point on, Feore brilliantly depicts a man who has become an observer of his own downfall. He murders again and again not out of any passion but to regain a sense of security even though he knows it is hopeless. He sees himself that a life that allows such evil has no meaning.
It is wonderful to see Yanna McIntosh at last play a major role on the Festival stage. She is a superb Lady Macbeth who makes you listen anew to every familiar line. She may have monstrous schemes of ambition, but she does not have the constitution to carry them through anymore than her husband. Indeed, her Lady Macbeth seems to begin her mental decline as soon as she has the pages blood on her hands, signalling far in advance of most actors the incipient madness that will turn her into an automaton constantly reliving the same horrors.
As Duncan, Geraint Wyn Davies is not the the usual decrepit old man, but a strong, vital leader whose absence will clearly lead to a power vacuum. Timothy D. Stickney is a well-spoken Banquo and Dion Johnstone a charismatic Macduff. Tom Rooney plays the Porter for the usual laughs, even though better productions show that his scene can be more effective when not staged as the “comic relief” favoured by high school teachers. On the other hand, there are too many actors, like André Sills as the Bleeding Sergeant, who mistake line endings in verse for periods and thus make nonsense of their speeches. Gareth Potter is a rather vacant Malcom. Sophia Walker’s Lady Macduff is better at shrieking than speaking and John Vickery’s Ross delivers the worst announcement of Macduff’s tragedy I’ve ever heard, his diction becoming prissier with each ghastly detail he describes. As the Weird Sisters Karen Glave, Amanda Lisman and Cara Ricketts go through the motions as clueless as McAnuff is as to what their function is.
A square of lights, seldom used, hangs over the stage only to be lowered once to signal briefly Macbeth’s isolation before being raised again. It frequently obstructs Michael Walton’s lighting of the actors, most notably of Yanna McIntosh whose face is not properly lit until the final bow. Even though McAnuff uses a fight director, an associate fight director and two assistant fight directors, the stage fights don’t look natural or frightening but choreographed and under-rehearsed.
Fans of Colm Feore and Yanna McIntosh will want to see them triumph in these iconic roles. Yet, they may well find that McAnuff’s peculiar setting, fuzzy thinking and penchant for technological overkill will deaden their enjoyment.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: Yanna Mcintosh and Colm Feore. ©David Hou.
2009-06-03
Macbeth