Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth is performed in a deconsecrated church in the back end of Ancoats, between empty office blocks, multi-storey car parks and the Toys’r’us superstore. The audience, of around 220, was called out in batches from the ticket office to the venue. Looking down from the 8 banked boxes, the audience can initially make out Lady Macbeth on the altar at one end, and the three witches like cuckooclocks poking out from under the choir at the other end. In between, in the muddy central passage, the action of the play began with a pitched battle in soaking rain which pours from the ceiling. Before a word is spoken we see Macbeth as a battlehardened leader, a man who is expected to return from war to play a part in civic and courtly society. That duality – warrior and courtier – haunts Branagh’s formidable, convincing performance. And his Macbeth is only sometimes courtly, only sometimes master of his emotions and actions: his bloodiest speeches are stuttered and stammered out of him here as if his role has indeed been written, fated, determined by the bloody origin of his eminence.
The play’s brilliant set pieces are wonderfully done: Banquo’s feast finally pushes Macbeth back into his warrior mode, confronted by an apparition and unable, in public now, to tamp down the horrors he is witnessing, which he has caused. In other scenes, though, Branagh’s reflective slow meditations on his predicament, occasionally halting to look skyward midsyllable, take on a stately grandeur, especially following the breakneck speed at which other scenes run and all this in a production, at around 140 minutes without an interval, which moves fast around his performance. The witches’ mysterious role benefits from this production’s whirlwind speed: they are a hallucinatory, evil emanation from the world of battle in which Macbeth has forged his reputation.
Macbeth has a number of significant minor roles and Branagh is accompanied by actors who have stamped their mark on their roles: Alex Kingston’s Lady Macbeth starts in white dress and ends in red, and like Branagh becomes increasingly aware that she is in the grip of emotions and a plot she cannot turn or reverse, clawing the air on the witches’ side of the set when last we see her. The other thanes and princes, at a terrible cost, come to understand the nature of Macbeth’s attack on the very foundations of their society. Macduff and Siward, losing their children and future, band together, while Malcolm is played almost to a different tune, with a Prince-Hal-like gamesomeness in the way he thinks through how best he may contribute to Macbeth’s downfall.
This thrilling production spares no expense with its effects: rain and fire, a brilliantly lit dagger floating around the eaves all contribute to the picture – electric with contemporary resonances – of a coup going horribly wrong, a powergrab which guarantees nothing in its wake except further violent chaos and more of the same…
John McAuliffe