New productions of Macbeth are exciting to behold, not least because the play is probably Shakespeare’s most accessible to the average playgoer. The play’s witchcraft and mysterious prophecies are thrilling. Its tale of an ambitious man and woman driven to power by evil means is timeless. The circumstances of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s journey, as Shakespeare imagined them, never seem to leave us, no matter how long ago we may have read the play.
During the first week of the Chichester Festival Theatre production’s new run at the Lyceum Theatre, Patrick Stewart lived up to every accolade he’s received since performing the title role at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this year.
As scholars have noted, the play’s language elegantly blends the sublime and the proverbial. Stewart understands Shakespeare’s poetry and how it should resonate in our ears. As the sinister Lady Macbeth and her husband’s cohort in crime, the much younger Kate Fleetwood appeared in phenomenally fine form. These two fine actors realized the dark conspiracy between Shakespeare’s most famous married couple with a poise that’s not always achieved on American stages.
The idea behind British director Rupert Goold’s jarring, forties-era staging seems fascinating. Goold’s filmic approach erases Shakespeare’s overt Celtic coloring and plays up its apocalyptic overtones. Shakespeare’s hag-like Weird Sisters are transformed into ominous, syringe-wielding hospital nurses. And though the play’s setting predates 1066, Goold situates feudal warlords Duncan and Macbeth in a nightmarish setting against movie footage that envisions the corruption under Stalin or Mussolini.
The set consists of a drab brick wall, interrupted by an old-style, cage-enclosed elevator that resembles a modern dungeon or torture chamber. At stage right up high, a small TV comes on and off intermittently. Fascist-era film footage and flickers of white noise provide the set variation that marks changes in scene.
Goold’s opening cleverly re-imagines an early scene involving the bloody sergeant who reports on Macbeth’s bravery during a fight against the rebel Macdonwald. Oddly, the wounded sergeant appears to die at the hands of one of the Weird “nurses,” who does the deed by injection. Like Roman Polanski and other filmmakers who exploited the play’s gruesome elements, Goold’s use of the scene is effective, though Shakespeare didn’t write it exactly this way.
Having the wounded sergeant die in the operating room is also a novel way to suggest the ambiguity of the Weird Sisters in general - do they simply predict fate, or are we to suppose that they actually influence it?
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