1998

Macbeth

William Shakespeare

State Theatre

Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The last time we saw Shakespeare performed in the Space was Neil Armfield’s Belvoir Company B repertory season of Hamlet and The Tempest. It was excellent chamber work which used the venue to great advantage. So it was a very great pity when Richard Roxburgh, playing Hamlet, did his cruciate on the second night, forcing the cancellation of an exemplary production.

The contrast with State Theatre’s ill-judged Macbeth is almost alarming. Certainly their rehearsal period was a vexed one. There were even press releases citing outbreaks of the kind of gremlins notoriously associated with the Scottish Play. But there are conceptual problems here which go well beyond the random irritations of bad luck.

It is hard to imagine that this visual ragout is the work of the same design team which gave us the elegant minimalism of Master Class. Somehow, this Macbeth has too much of everything. It is crammed into the confines of the Space and instead of making a virtue of economy and understatement the production is over amplified, stylistically confused and – with thirteen student performers augmenting a cast of fourteen-  impossibly overstaffed.

Let me say that the idea of providing young actors with an opportunity to participate in a major production is excellent – but this was not the time, or place, to do it. A venue like the Playhouse, perhaps. But, even there, more would be needed to make the numbers interesting to look at. As it is, the extras mill around awkwardly and self-consciously. When Lady Macbeth says “Stand not upon the order of your going” we rather wish she hadn’t, because the subsequent departure is neither art nor life.

There are always choices to be made with Macbeth. What sort of world is it ? What about the witches ? What is the motivation for Macbeth and his relationship with his ambitious wife ? None of these is well-managed. Dressed, by designer Jennie Tate, in cut down battle gear Macbeth and Banquo look like members of an outlaw biker gang. The witches, dimly lit in a sort of ditch, intone interminably while, in David Walters’ lighting, an etching pattern is projected on to the entire proceedings. Voices are whispering, emanating from loud speakers above the stage. The witches are turning every word into seventeen syllables. Banquo is gawping. It is an eisteddfod of coarse acting.

As Macbeth, the usually reliable Jeremy Sims tries a bit of everything. There is some of his swashbuckling Pericles from the Bell production. Then, with Essie Davis as Lady M, he plays Macbeth like a pizza delivery boy about to get lucky with a bored housewife. The sexual dynamics are clumsily obvious and the Thane’s submissiveness is too predictable. Sims’s performance settles down, though, and eventually there are some quieter shadings, as there are for Essie Davis when Lady Macbeth goes into guilt-wrung madness. But along the way there is too much huff and puff. When Macbeth returns to the witches, for instance, they sound like they are channeling the Two Fat Ladies and he sounds like the ghost of Richard Burton.

Many of the cast seem uneasy in their roles. Nathan Page, as the young Malcolm, is uncertain in the opening scenes and his return at the end of the play is not helped by the fact that he is dressed like the purser from the Love Boat. Gregory Ulfan is heavy-handed as Banquo and Michael Habib gives us a veritable concerto of bodily fluids as the porter. John Walter is conscientious as Macduff but the scene when the deaths of his family are reported is too difficult to be sustained.

Bronwen James makes an all too brief appearance as Lady Macduff, her strong stage presence overtaken by the sudden shift to action mode as she and her beamish boy are savagely despatched by a team of ninjas. Perhaps only Stephen Sheehan as Seyton, Macbeth’s Lurch-like servant, has a sense of how little is required in the intimate dynamics of the Space.

Given the size of the performing area and the proximity of the audience the use of voice mikes is entirely superfluous, especially when many of the players bellow as if projecting to an audience of two thousand. The levels are all over the place and the action is needlessly punctuated by thunderous drumming as well as Max  Lyandvert’s hypermanic soundscape.

This Macbeth is a series of ideas flung together but unresolved. The stage consists of a mezzanine which often looks like an overcrowded elevator, a ramp too steep to sustain the lugubrious attempts at slow march and other pageantry and a floor space bounded by spooky looking footlights. The use of primary colours -blues and type O haemoglobin- especially with the sliding panels  and vertical blinds, has a Japanese simplicity. But the costuming is either pre-Revolution Romanov or hackneyed great coat militaria. This, most definitely, does not go with that.

Rodney Fisher has made us wait two and a half hours without interval before Macbeth is finally drummed to death – and by then not very much has touched us. Mac and wife are both extinct and the kingdom looks like it has been visited by Charles Manson. But there is precious little of that pity and fear Aristotle encouraged us to expect from tragedy. Instead, the production teeters under its own logistics. And a lot of sound and fury – signifying not much.

The Adelaide Review, No.179, August, 1998. p.33.