macbeth
I spent All Hallows' Eve watching Macbeth at the Gielgud Theatre and it was probably the best play I've ever been to see. Magnificent and gripping, and steeped in blood and drama from beginning to end. I love the play anyway, but this production is really something special.
I've been going to impro classes with Alex F over the last six weeks and although I'm not the best improviser ever, the class has really taught me to look at drama more carefully and given me a better insight into what makes scenes engaging and interesting. I was appreciating lots of things about Macbeth from an improv point of view tonight. For example, they raise the stakes in this production fast and hard, which makes sense in a play that gets into the business of killing everyone very early on but is still striking. Lady Macbeth walks on for her first scene in Act I literally quivering with evil, beginning the"unsex me here" soliloquy in a slow frightful whisper and then escalating, spitting forth "take my milk for gall" like venom. When Macduff receives the news that his wife and children have been slaughtered, there is a long long silence as he comes right to the front of the stage, no holding back, and then finally cries like a wounded animal.
The setting is like a cross between an abbatoir and a Nazi hospital and the witches are three bloody knife wielding nurses, with loud amplified voices and wild strobe lights. They manage to deliver their tacky chants and songs in a credible way, even doing "hubble bubble toil and trouble" as a strange rap song in a morgue. Banquo's bloody arrival at the feast is spectacular and gory and they play this scene once before the interval and once after, so that you can see Macbeth confronting the real grisly corpse of Banquo, and then see Macbeth confronting thin air, as it appears to the other guests.
Kate Fleetwood is amazing as Lady Macbeth and Patrick Stewart is even better as Macbeth. My improv classes made me notice their constantly shifting emotions and changing status which made them so compelling to watch, as each alternately took the lead in "screw ing their courage to the sticking-place" and then falling prey to fear and madness.
Patrick Stewart is fascinating to watch – he's always doing things as he speaks, making a ham sandwich, opening a bottle of red wine, doing up his bow tie – and by the end of the play he is totally in command of the stage, frequently making the audience laugh with his increasingly mad and scary levity but then switching to intense poignant weariness for "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow".
And the final scene – wow. Macduff arrives to salute Malcolm as king carrying Patrick Stewart's bald covered in blood severed head! It's genius! That Picardian dome means that you can recognise it a mile off! He holds his severed head aloft as he invites everyone to see him "crown'd at Scone" and turns it around to face the audience as the lights go out!
|
