
Macbeth
**
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Tue 19 Mar
It seems everything nowadays is set in ‘a post-apocalyptic world of anarchy and uncertainty,’ even real life.
This National Theatre touring production of Shakespeare’s bloody masterpiece certainly ticks all the boxes on the dystopian front: dimly-lit stage, festooned in rags and driftwood, check! Actors in combat fatigues, check! Music so downbeat it makes Radiohead sound like Bucks Fizz, check!
The problem is that everything feels so bolted together, so preposterously contrived that one is left not really knowing why things are as they are, where things are and, even worse, not really caring why, where or how.
The result is that one of the greatest tragedies in world literature gets lost in a series of half-baked ideas, wrong decisions and performances so uneven you could go mountain biking on them with director Rufus Norris carrying the can I guess.
Michael Nardone starts so slowly as Macbeth you want to jump on stage and attach jump leads to him. The weird thing is that this is in stark contrast to Shakespeare’s lithe plotting which hurls us into the action at breakneck pace.
What Nardone’s Macbeth does have though is the touch of the common man about him, which fits perfectly with the myriad analogies of him being in borrowed garments or in clothes too big. His telling of the ‘sound and fury’ soliloquy too is close to brilliant.
Another failing is the lack of believability in the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which is at the very heart of the drama. Indeed Kirsty Besterman’s Lady Macbeth is permanently under-powered and so unsensual and seductive you feel she could hardly convince you to switch over and watch Emmerdale let alone murder a king.
But there are some wonderful performances, particularly Patrick Robinson’s stolid Banquo, Rachel Sanders’ powerful Ross and Joseph Brown’s strangely fascinating Malcolm.
Amazingly the best thing is Deka Walmsley’s well-rounded Porter. A notoriously difficult role, I would have liked to have seen more of him and how often does one come out of a production of Macbeth saying that?
Personally I thought the witches were great, looking like extras from some cult Japanese horror film as they undulated, sprinted and climbed poles, but my companion thought they were daft so they must be doing something right.
The staging is awkward at times too. The appearance of Banquo’s ghost is horribly fudged, giving the impression the King of Scotland hosts his dinner parties in a broom cupboard at Dunsinane Castle.
This production proves so hit and miss, so patchy and unsatisfying that you can’t work out if it is a disaster avoided or a stunning staging that never quite convinces. It does prove one thing though, it is surely time to call a moratorium on setting Shakespeare in some distant dystopian future. Pretty please.
words Steve Tucker