Macbeth
2018: Robin Lough

This recent Macbeth from the Royal Shakespeare Company is of a piece with most of their recent productions in seeking an ever-so-contemporary setting in which to represent the events of a historical or quasi-historical reality and render them fundamentally absurd. Macbeth is a play that supports a kind of surreal or hallucinatory reality without really needing to be supplemented by ridiculous details.

There are a number of ways to portray the character of Macbeth. Some actors and producers go for the extravagant outpouring of emotion. Such a scenery-chewing Macbeth was obviously favored in some periods: Nicol Williamson did something like that in the BBC version (though not on the stage in Stratford only a few years earlier). All in all, such an approach seems inconsistent with the persona of a man who coolly kills his king and arranges the deaths of a number of others, while — except for his unhinged banquet scene — not letting on that he’s anything other than a loyal and trustworthy man. Here Christopher Eccleston, known popularly as the first of the Doctor Who actors in the modern rebooted version of the series, follows in this tradition. He gasps out his lines in fragmentary passionate bursts of not-quite-coherent dialogue, punctuating randomly-selected phrases or single words with special emphases that defy rational analysis.

Niamh Cusack (Lady Macbeth) is clearly a capable actress, and her diction somewhat less random than Eccleston’s Macbeth, but she’s given a constrained absurdist context in which to move. She clearly has thought about the humanity of the part, but is hemmed in by a postmodern absurdist sensibility. One needs to watch the interview with her (an extra element on the DVD) to get a reasonable sense of where her characterization is coming from. I have seldom seen anyone capable of representing Lady Macbeth’s mad scene entirely plausibly; it certainly doesn’t happen here. Her inner conflict is reproduced in (to shamelessly fuse vocabulary from T. S. Eliot) a set of objective correlatives that are themselves a heap of broken images. We are left fishing for what it all means, if anything. Lady Macbeth fetches some water from an office-style water cooler, and then dusts her hands with flour (or something like it); she rants in a wild-eyed fashion at one moment, and lolls about on the floor the next, cooing about the state of the world.

The other roles are similarly eccentric or willfully contrarian throughout. The three Weird Sisters (“you secret, black, and midnight hags”) are played (just for the absurdist value of it all, I guess) by three cherubic little blonde girls. There’s a certain creepy quality about that, but it seems more of a piece with the horror movie aesthetic than with what Shakespeare had in mind. The porter plays his role in a toneless deadpan that is somewhat comical, and at least a nice variation from the aimless verbal fireworks from the principals. He later on writes tallies (of what?) on a brick wall. The chief of the murderers of the Macduffs pauses, while finishing up, to contemplate a Rubik’s Cube. By that point, this arbitrary detail is just another random happening. Does the Rubik’s Cube have some special symbolic meaning? Perhaps. Do we care, at this point? I didn’t.

Donalbain (Malcolm’s brother) is played by a woman. One wonders why, but it probably doesn’t matter. Similarly the doctor who fails to diagnose Lady Macbeth’s condition when she’s sleepwalking is a woman. This bothers me rather little, since neither is a particularly important part, but it is perhaps worth arguing (a vain protest, I know) that Shakespeare’s world was not one of gender fluidity; moreover, in his day and age (or in Macbeth’s), there were not many women working as physicians.

For reasons beyond analysis, the stage is surmounted by a set of reductive supertitles, in which each scene is labeled with respect (apparently) to its meaning. These don’t really explain much about the play (which really requires more than a handful of captions to understand). Are they supposed to tell an otherwise inattentive audience what to think about all these absurd goings-on? If the story had been played in a more straightforward fashion, they certainly wouldn’t have been necessary.

In addition, we have a digital countdown timer, starting at two hours, which begins at the beginning of Act II. Why it starts then, I don’t know. It reaches zero at the moment of Macbeth’s death. Perhaps this is supposed to clue the audience in on the surprising fact that Macbeth is doomed and is going to die. Alternatively, perhaps it was demanded by the audience, who wanted to know how much more of this incoherent presentation they had yet to endure.

As a study in the self-important excesses of modern theatricality, this is perhaps worth seeing. For those looking for a useful presentation of Macbeth, however, almost certainly anything else would do better.

Buy Macbeth on DVD from Amazon.