Macbeth
2001: Gregory Doran

Based on a Royal Shakespeare Company stage performance in Stratford that also toured in Japan and the United States, this production of Macbeth has a rare urgency and intensity, and though I would not personally recommend it for a student first coming to the play, some of its performances are so compelling that they are not to be missed.

The New York Times, according to the blurb on the jacket of the DVD, characterized it as “a harrowing and disturbingly funny parable for the dawn of the 21st century.” Therein, perhaps, lies its strengh and its weakness. Shakespeare’s plays are not, in general, parables: I personally tend to think they ought not be mere media on which to mount a contemporary manifesto of any sort. Story in its purest form transcends any particular allegorical application. Seen on its own terms, neither is the play really a funny one. There are moments of humor, of course, as almost always in Shakespeare’s tragedies, but they are strategically placed to heighten the dramatic effect. Ultimately the play examines the appalling consequences of a murder on the soul of the murderer, and that is story enough for any occasion, and message enough for any story. It’s not especially funny.

Being an RSC production, it perhaps goes without saying, too, that It is yet another modern-dress version, in which soldiers wear berets, bandoliers, and carry automatic rifles; this inevitably gives rise to questions about why someone like the bloody sergeant at the beginning of the play — a lyrical character, but not one apparently given to lapses into gratuitous metaphor — should be talking about swords instead of guns. This is not an axe I particularly want to grind again; my opinions on the matter are recorded elsewhere.

The compelling linch-pin of this particular production is the pair of performances by Antony Sher and Harriet Walter as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Both are seasoned actors of considerable powers. Sher’s Macbeth is, to my taste, a little too volatile: he occasionally spontaneously decides to bark out a word or a phrase loudly for no particular reason other than theatrical variatio; his physical antics too — batting himself in the head and then suddenly breaking into laughter — seem a bit too arbitrary, but they do endow him with a remarkable manic intensity. Macbeth can be played that way; is is not, I think, intrinsically demanded by the role.Nor do I think it is really in keeping with Shakespeare’s vision of the character.

Walter’s performance as Lady Macbeth is simply one of the best I have ever seen. Her character arc is plausible from beginning to end: she is overtaken by ambition and then undone by the fears she has brought upon herself. The role is a plum role, but it’s a difficult one, and it can easily become a kind of self-parody, as it does, I think, in some other instances. It requires restraint and some degree of maturity. (Walter may be known to modern American audiences from The Crown or Star Wars VII; she also played Harriet Vane in the Masterpiece Theatre version of some of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter stories in 1987.)

The banquet scene is always one of the indices of the production’s approach to the metaphysics of the play: if Banquo does not actually appear there, we are compelled to parse it as effectively a psychological aberration on Macbeth’s part. That is what happens here. I think that’s a fundamentally mistaken approach to the play; Shakespeare’s dramas support the encroachment of the actual supernatural into the narrative, and certainly here, where the three weird sisters predict the future with uncanny accuracy, one cannot write all of their interference off as a byproduct of Macbeth’s psychology. As in Hamlet, the emphasis is not psychological but spiritual. The doctor himself says as much of Lady Macbeth’s mad scene: “More needs she the divine than the physician.” Producers of the play would do well to remember that.

The roles of the Weird Sisters themselves are adequately (and suitably weirdly) fulfilled. Their appearance in the middle of the play is accomplished by an unusual mechanism — rather than having Macbeth go in search of them after the disastrous banquet, they appear in the banquet hall under the table once the guests have left.

The Porter scene is played to the point of excess and beyond, I think. Lingering shots of the porter throwing up in a latrine seem to me to be gratuitously graphic and ultimately a distraction from the matter at hand. The dialogue carries both humor and the grotesquery of the scene, as well as providing the interpretive key to the entire play in its extended disquisition on equivocation. As written, it does so while still keeping in step with the tonality of the play overall.

All in all, this is a fitfully engaging version of the play, dragged down in some places by a number of false moves, and elevated in others by moments of extraordinary insight. On the balance, it’s certainly worth watching, especially in company with other performances. I would not recommend it as a first performance of the play for anyone.

Buy Macbeth from Amazon.