Taut, precise and horrifically exacting; an up-to-the minute rendition of this bloodiest of plays, where the weird sisters are the ghosts of young women raped and murdered in the opening scenes and McDuff’s Nintendo playing son is slaughtered, real time, over the kitchen sink as his mother watches. She fights and screams as we know we would fight and scream. This is your kitchen and your child; it’s happening now and not four hundred years ago. There’s no room for willing suspension in this production, no historical or literary distancing; it’s in our faces and our hearts (and stomachs) are called to account.
The Royal Exchange Theatre in the round is particularly suited to this kind of interpretation. The performance takes place like a fight the audience has stepped back to witness, and we are either uncomfortably close or looking down with ambivalence. It’s usefulness for performing Shakespeare is obvious, as is the unconscious reminder of more ancient modes; the link between the modern and the arcane is already made.
So what of the staging? The visual blanket bombing of army camouflage tends at first to blend the actors (although Nicholas Gleaves’ Macbeth is immediately identifiable due to a mesmerising stage presence); and then becomes irrelevant – they have to wear something, although it felt most appropriate in the final act when Macbeth’s ‘armour’ is black. There’s a moment of nakedness when Macbeth showers, stage centre, after Duncan’s murder and leaves a slick of watery blood that remains throughout the performance. Blood is a character in its own right, spurting in gobbets from victim’s mouths, smeared across the stage, carried in buckets that may or may not be heading our way. But, we know, because we’re always being told, of the ‘timeless relevance of the Bard’; does it need to be made obvious with flak jackets and video screens and laptop computers? (some of the less useful, and at times, distracting paraphernalia, although mobile phones blended nicely); do we need it hammering home as if it’s something we’ve missed?
But somehow, although not without flaws (Lady Macbeth on a psychiatric ward watched through plexi-glass by her doctors felt like the unavoidable that should have been avoided), this isn’t what happens; the last thing you feel is patronised. The metaphorical transformation of the witches is not only inspired but one of the most chilling aspects of the production – I began to dread every time they appeared – and believed this could well have been an original Shakespearean intention just waiting to be noticed.
There’s a soundtrack too, Talking Heads, The Ting Tings, a filmic intensity and an emotional manipulation that is not shirked in favour of subtlety or suggestion. In other places, the play rings with the laments of women and constant reminders of the price, in war, paid by children. The foregrounding of the presence of children – and some excellent performances – is another brave aspect of this Shakespeare, when so often children are sidelined or not seen at all. Nature is torn apart when men choose violence over time and law, and the shrieks of owls, the self immolation of horses is echoed by the sounds of distant bombing. When it doesn’t drown out the dialogue or interfere with the visual concentration, it provides a tempo to the escalation of violence. And it is violence that is most palpable here: I came away with the sense of having been close to something that most of us are protected from and some of us strive to keep hidden.
The final scene, Aas Duncan’s son rehearses his speech amid sounds off of cheering crowds, draws a parallel that, in its visual simplicity is perhaps the most striking of all: is this Obama we are being asked to see? As we are left to ponder the audacity of this, Fleance takes stage, flanked by the weird sisters, dipping his knife into a bucket of blood.
Whatever your take on such modern renditions, however forced parts of this may seem, the message is clear: that there is not much, in essence, that divides us, not, at least, time: horror is horror whenever it is enacted. This production feels less a crude shove to recognise the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s ideas than a fusing of human history to expose its base elements. There are moments in this production when the language of Shakespeare achieves its true power through raw expression and becomes permeable, a timeless utterance. This is Shakespearean tragedy as I’m sure it was meant to be: alive with presence and thoroughly alarming.
Sarah Corbett