Macbeth: Review By George Fleeton

Macbeth Review By George Fleeton The most mature period of Shakespeare’s output is redolent with his greatest tragedies. Hamlet, Othello and King Lear had each preceded Macbeth, which itself was first performed exactly four hundred years ago. It took enormous liberties with the little that was known about the real Macbeth, who reigned as an apparently effective King of Scotland from 1040 to 1057. London-based Icarus Theatre Collective brought their touring production of the Scottish play, with a cast of seven actors, to Newcastle on October 22. Macbeth is the tragedy of an individual’s conscience: when we first meet him, he is a man of strong but imperfect moral sense who will stop at nothing to get and to keep at any cost what he covets. [caption id="attachment_30922" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Orson Welles in the film of Macbeth."][/caption] By drama’s end, he has lost all feeling and conscience, unable to react to his wife’s death, or to the car crash of his own life – ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Among the best and more imaginative adaptations of Macbeth are Verdi’s 1847 opera and Kurosawa’s 1957 film Throne of Blood. Shakespeare’s psychological insights, the play’s bitter humour, and its many passages of great poetry are still impressively valid, four centuries later, resonating for us today in the parallels of the tragedy of Libya and of the death of Gaddafi. Icarus visited Downpatrick last November, touring Hamlet. Then, as now with their Macbeth, the production was far from being pitch or pace perfect. The dramatic impact of both plays, a year apart, was greatly diluted by productions that were under directed and unimaginatively dressed and lit,  so that in no sense was the audience purged or informed by watching someone else’s fictional mental distress (Lady Macbeth) or physical torment (the Macduffs, and Macbeth himself). Yet another production of Shakespeare which was neither magnificently stimulating nor thought provoking theatre does the genius of Macbeth no service whatsoever. The actors, an ensemble that tried very hard to work together with much tactility on the night, are not to blame for this. Indeed both Emma Carter as Lady Macduff and Matthew Bloxham (Banquo, and the Porter) did rise above the mediocrity. But Sophie Brooke, as Lady Macbeth, charged her way into the letter scene, and cleaning up after Duncan’s murder, at so high a level of melodrama as to dilute the effect of her mad scene which, though excellent, left her character stranded in a cul de sac of the director’s making. Joel Gorf’s Macbeth conveyed little of his character’s downward spiral from brashness to megalomania; indeed some of his set piece monologues sound like auditions for the role, as if Shakespeare’s complex and elaborate courtly languages had gone AWOL. The sound design had clearly been worked at, but it was too fussy, while the scene and costume transitions, well executed, were victims of the state of stasis inflicted on all of us by a set which gave the eye no excitement, nowhere to wander, for nearly two and a half hours. The reception which productions such as this receive here does beg the obvious question, first raised in these columns over two and a half years ago: where is our own ‘about-to-be-newly re-opened’ Arts Centre-based theatre company? We know of towns half this size with vibrant semi-professional performance groups, in both music and drama. Downpatrick remains the only county town on this island outside that particular fold. A little more vision and imagination is required if the only improvement we can look forward to in Scotch Street from December 1^st is what the builders left behind. For we clearly have the audience in the hinterland. Yet for the excitement and stimulation of live theatre which that audience anticipates and relishes, we depend on visiting, fit-up troupes. Around us theatre studies is flourishing in further and higher education. And while the new Lyric theatre is in a league of its own, this part of the world needs an equally imaginative theatrical entrepreneur to step up to the home plate. First and second bases are already in place. What we need is the guy or the gal with the bat and the balls. www.icarustheatre.co.uk * There are single performances of Madama Butterfly and The Nutcracker in the Waterfront Hall on November 01 and 02 respectively. And George Fleeton is presenting the restored and re-released Marcel Carné film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) in the QFT on December 5 (note change of date).]]>