Macbeth
2010: Rupert Goold

This is a Great Performances production from PBS in 2010, with Patrick Stewart in the title role. Stewart — known worldwide, of course, as Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation — was a long-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he has well-established Shakespearean skills. They do not fail him here, and playing the spacefaring captain for seven years does not seem to have dulled his diction or delivery. Born in 1940, one might plausibly wonder whether he is any longer really young enough to play Macbeth: from the descriptions of his physical prowess on the battlefield, one has to assume that Macbeth is not much past middle age. One doubts that at seventy he would have quite such skills. Still, he’s reasonably robust and moves and acts with conviction.

More importantly, his representation of the character is thoughtful and complex. Macbeth is more than normally reflective, and delivers several of his monologues in a rather muted tone. Almost all his lines are rendered with a deep understanding of their meaning, and not expostulated or bleated out as some kind of demonstration of theatricality (as, for example, Antony Sher’s); Macbeth solicits the services of the murderers who are going to take out Banquo while assembling and eating a sandwich. The scene is itself something of a revelation. As the story line progresses, he becomes more and more erratic in his behavior and diction: as a kind of objective correlative of his disordered mind, it certainly works well.

Kate Fleetwood, thirty-two years his junior, makes a somewhat implausible wife, though as a Lady Macbeth she is not intrinsically hard to believe. She plays the role with a monotonic coldness that is far less human than some others who have essayed the role (Harriet Walter and Helen Baxendale come to mind). Personally I find the representation less interesting than a more varied approach.

Like almost all modern renditions of Macbeth, this is put into a modern setting, with barracks, dingy hallways in institutional buildings, and interstitial scenes of mobs in Stalinist or Fascist rallies. Some bits even take place on trains — in fact, Banquo is assassinated on a mostly full rail coach. The remaining people on the coach are polished off with a gratuitous burst of gunfire. The rationale for this is more than a little obscure, if one has any vestigial concern for the literal meaning of the lines, inasmuch as Macbeth has been discussing his equestrian adventures earlier (and does so from the back of an actual horse).

For all that, there are several features of the production that might be thought somewhat arch or overly clever, but they tend to make a few of the more problematic passages work.

The first is the first appearance of the three Weird Sisters. The bloody sergeant who has delivered his report to Duncan is dying on a gurney; the heart monitor flatlines, and then the three nurses attending him unmask and prove to be the three Weird Sisters. (Clearly the temptation to pun on the British meaning of “sister” was too much to resist.) I found that much reasonably effective, if only because of its surprise. Later — apparently because just telling the story is too pedestrian — they resort to a kind of hip-hop dance routine in the morgue. This seemed . The oracular figures who lay out the future (Act III, Sc. vi) are represented by several of the corpses. It’s a curious conceit, though I’m not persuaded that it really clarifies or illumines the play.

The second is the always-problematic “Is this a dagger...?” speech. Here, Macbeth has taken out the diamond that Duncan has sent to Lady Macbeth in the previous scene. He’s holding this as he asks the question, and at least having some focus for his perceptions — however delusional — makes it all seems somewhat more comprehensible.

The banquet scene (III, iv) is more than usually convoluted; there are multiple layers of reality, in which it is no longer clear that the ghost of Banquo (who does make an appearance) is anything more than a figment of Macbeth’s imagination. There are various realities that swap in and out with a chaotic collection of noises; the whole winds up with an inexplicable dance, to apparently German or Russian songs. This scene, which is organically central to the play — arguably its dramatic core — is rendered up with such a melange of disparate visual and representational ideas that it collapses for want of any internal integrity.

Lennox in the first part of the play (when the others arrive at the castle after the murder of Duncan) is somewhat arbitrarily played by a woman. It’s not clear quite why, but that’s not really problematic either. Later he’s a man. Why the producers/directors have pushed for this discontinuity of roles is unclear.

The scene (IV, ii) in which Lady Macduff and her son are visited and are finally overtaken and killed is a model of restraint: it’s dramatically compelling and affecting. Would that the remainder of the play had been reined in on parallel principles. Macduff’s scene with Malcolm, when he is informed of their death, is similarly dramatically very effective: Michael Feast carries the role with considerable gravity and power.

This is a performance worth mining for its understanding of various bits of the play, but as a representation of the whole, it lacks coherence and rationale for much of what it does. It’s chock-full of clever conceits, but many of them lead effectively nowhere. Worth seeing, but not the first version to see for anyone.

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