Patrick Stewart is a great actor giving a less-than-great performance as Macbeth, in the Chichester Festival Theatre Production that’s currently on Broadway in a limited engagement. With the exception of a few electrically charged moments, in Stewart’s playing Shakespeare’s tyrant seems mostly tired. This is a valid interpretation — Macbeth’s middle-of-the-night crimes have the effect of robbing their perpetrator of rest, just as they rob his victims of life — but a plodding, sleep-deprived Macbeth leaves a big gap at the center of this production.
Even before his regicide-induced insomnia, this Macbeth’s desire for the throne frequently wavers (though once he gains it he’s determined to hold on to the bitter end). Certainly he’s less enthused about the prospect of kinghood than Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth is about her impending queenhood. In this production, the couple’s age difference (sixty-something Stewart is paired with the thirtyish Fleetwood) helps emphasize her activity and his passivity, her desire for a kingdom to rule for decades to come versus his desire for a bit of rest after many long and hard-fought military campaigns.
Fleetwood has some powerful moments, such as the can’t-miss sleepwalking scene (“Out, damned spot!”), but the vital connection that should charge the air between her and Stewart is only fitful. Nor is there much sexual heat between the couple, despite a few bits of graphic groping. While Macbeth as the passive pawn of his bloodthirsty, single-minded wife makes sense as a reading of the play, there’s little evidence in this production of the libidinal hold that a young wife would use to manipulate an older husband.
Even with this gap at its center, this production, directed by Rupert Goold with stunning set and costume designs by Anthony Ward, does offer several powerful moments. Set in an industrial-looking, white-tiled kitchen that’s half morgue, half slaughterhouse, with Soviet-era costumes to remind us of Stalinist tyrants ordering killings as casually as they order lunch, Goold drenches this bloody play in plenty of blood.
It’s a concept that creates some thought-provoking connections. The Weird Sisters who set Macbeth on his path to destruction are indeed sisters, as the Brits call hospital nurses. Played by Sophie Hunter, Niamh McGrady, and Polly Frame, they set the chilling tone at the start when they quiet a badly wounded soldier who has just delivered the play’s first important piece of exposition. As they plunge a huge hypodermic needle into his neck, they might just be giving him a sedative — or perhaps, having served his purpose, he’s going to be quiet for good. The sisters’ motives remain appropriately ambiguous throughout.
The hospital/morgue imagery returns in Act IV, Scene 1, when the witches wheel out white plastic body bags on steel gurneys to give more misleading information to Macbeth. Wriggling like trapped insects, these faceless soothsayers provide Macbeth with the false confidence that he is invincible. The creepily effective video and projection design by Lorna Heavey, in conjunction with Adam Cork’s sound design, make these and other scenes convincingly horrifying, even to an audience numbed by the graphic horrors of Saw, Hostel, and their cinematic ilk.
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