extraordinarily difficult to stage effectively
Well, Geoffrey Tennant was right again.
The National Theatre production of Macbeth, starring Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff, was…perplexing. I didn’t hate it as much as some of the reviews I read - mostly because I rated Kinnear’s and Duff’s performances slightly higher than they did - but it still felt incoherent and unnecessary. Rufus Norris decided that the rebellion at the beginning of the play, rather than showing us a rightful king defending his own, was just another spasm of a post-apocalyptic civil war that had been going on for some time. (The aesthetic was all garbage bags and duct tape: I couldn’t help but giggle at the part where two men tape Macbeth’s armor onto his body near the end of the play, winding tape around him like a parcel they were readying for the post.) If, however, Duncan is not an anointed king, but instead just some jumped-up former-civilian-turned-warlord (which was heavily implied by the little featurette before the broadcast), that makes a hash of Macbeth’s recognition that Duncan “hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off.” That language of angels and damnation is hollowed out if Duncan hasn’t been invested with royalty, if kingship isn’t a holy office.
(All that said, Banquo’s murderers were possibly the most inexplicable thing about the whole production: a giant ‘80s frat boy in a pale denim jacket and a blonde ditz in tatty fishnets and a hot-pink top with a plunging neckline - so it’s comforting to know that insulting class stereotypes will still exist after the apocalypse, I guess.)
To be fair, I can - almost - imagine how one might read Macbeth, with all its apocalyptic language, and decide to toy around with such a setting. But the blinking neon problem with this interpretation is that Macbeth’s terrible deed is the cause of the apocalypse. That’s when the earthquakes start, and nature turns on itself, horses devouring each other - the very night Macbeth kills Duncan. If the murder changes nothing about Scotland, then the play means nothing - both because it’s utterly baffling why Macbeth wants to be king in the first place (“vaulting ambition” for what? All Duncan seems to have that Macbeth does not is a slightly nicer red suit and a silk scarf!), and because it’s utterly baffling why anyone thinks that backing Malcolm will make any difference at all. Why does Macduff go all the way to England, leaving his wife and children unprotected, if Malcolm is just the son of the previous random warlord, and Scotland was already a destroyed land where shrieks are “made, not marked”? (Come to that, why doesn’t Macduff just defeat Macbeth and take over? He’s the one who seems to have the battle prowess, anyway - and Malcolm was conspicuously wounded in this production, his arm in a sling and his hand bloodily bandaged - which might have been a way to give him a reason not to fight Macbeth himself, if Norris felt one was necessary, but compounds the problem that Malcolm, if he is not the rightful heir to a rightful king, and putting him in charge is not about restoration of the social and moral order, is pretty surplus to requirements in this production.) Unsurprisingly, all Malcolm’s talk about failing to possess “the king-becoming graces” was cut (and so was the bit where the king of England, a truly holy king, can heal with his touch): this production creates a world where such talk wouldn’t even make sense - but the problem is that the world of the play is such a world, and Macbeth’s “horrid deed” has shattered that world. The value of Macbeth, it seems to me, is not in the number of grisly beheadings it allows you to stage, but in watching how a man becomes a tyrant, and how tyranny deforms a nation - but if it’s never clear how Macbeth is a tyrant, since there are no longer any social or ethical rules to contravene, and if the nation is already deformed, then we’re just watching…what?
There was one part I liked, though. For the most part, the set was unrelievedly grim and unappealing, and the various rotations of parts of the set didn’t seem to add much to the action, but at the very end, it allowed Kinnear’s Macbeth to step through the doorway into the concrete hideout where Lady Macbeth had killed herself, and for us to then follow him into it - almost like a film cut - so that “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” became a direct elegy to Lady Macbeth instead of just an oblique one, as he cradled her body in his arms. Even more than the speech itself, though, I liked what it did to his “At least we’ll die with harness on our back” - which became a sort of valediction to her, a squaring of Macbeth’s shoulders before battle, in order to do her proud. I’m not sure it was worth the rest of the production to get to that moment, however.
The National Theatre production of Macbeth, starring Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff, was…perplexing. I didn’t hate it as much as some of the reviews I read - mostly because I rated Kinnear’s and Duff’s performances slightly higher than they did - but it still felt incoherent and unnecessary. Rufus Norris decided that the rebellion at the beginning of the play, rather than showing us a rightful king defending his own, was just another spasm of a post-apocalyptic civil war that had been going on for some time. (The aesthetic was all garbage bags and duct tape: I couldn’t help but giggle at the part where two men tape Macbeth’s armor onto his body near the end of the play, winding tape around him like a parcel they were readying for the post.) If, however, Duncan is not an anointed king, but instead just some jumped-up former-civilian-turned-warlord (which was heavily implied by the little featurette before the broadcast), that makes a hash of Macbeth’s recognition that Duncan “hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off.” That language of angels and damnation is hollowed out if Duncan hasn’t been invested with royalty, if kingship isn’t a holy office.
(All that said, Banquo’s murderers were possibly the most inexplicable thing about the whole production: a giant ‘80s frat boy in a pale denim jacket and a blonde ditz in tatty fishnets and a hot-pink top with a plunging neckline - so it’s comforting to know that insulting class stereotypes will still exist after the apocalypse, I guess.)
To be fair, I can - almost - imagine how one might read Macbeth, with all its apocalyptic language, and decide to toy around with such a setting. But the blinking neon problem with this interpretation is that Macbeth’s terrible deed is the cause of the apocalypse. That’s when the earthquakes start, and nature turns on itself, horses devouring each other - the very night Macbeth kills Duncan. If the murder changes nothing about Scotland, then the play means nothing - both because it’s utterly baffling why Macbeth wants to be king in the first place (“vaulting ambition” for what? All Duncan seems to have that Macbeth does not is a slightly nicer red suit and a silk scarf!), and because it’s utterly baffling why anyone thinks that backing Malcolm will make any difference at all. Why does Macduff go all the way to England, leaving his wife and children unprotected, if Malcolm is just the son of the previous random warlord, and Scotland was already a destroyed land where shrieks are “made, not marked”? (Come to that, why doesn’t Macduff just defeat Macbeth and take over? He’s the one who seems to have the battle prowess, anyway - and Malcolm was conspicuously wounded in this production, his arm in a sling and his hand bloodily bandaged - which might have been a way to give him a reason not to fight Macbeth himself, if Norris felt one was necessary, but compounds the problem that Malcolm, if he is not the rightful heir to a rightful king, and putting him in charge is not about restoration of the social and moral order, is pretty surplus to requirements in this production.) Unsurprisingly, all Malcolm’s talk about failing to possess “the king-becoming graces” was cut (and so was the bit where the king of England, a truly holy king, can heal with his touch): this production creates a world where such talk wouldn’t even make sense - but the problem is that the world of the play is such a world, and Macbeth’s “horrid deed” has shattered that world. The value of Macbeth, it seems to me, is not in the number of grisly beheadings it allows you to stage, but in watching how a man becomes a tyrant, and how tyranny deforms a nation - but if it’s never clear how Macbeth is a tyrant, since there are no longer any social or ethical rules to contravene, and if the nation is already deformed, then we’re just watching…what?
There was one part I liked, though. For the most part, the set was unrelievedly grim and unappealing, and the various rotations of parts of the set didn’t seem to add much to the action, but at the very end, it allowed Kinnear’s Macbeth to step through the doorway into the concrete hideout where Lady Macbeth had killed herself, and for us to then follow him into it - almost like a film cut - so that “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” became a direct elegy to Lady Macbeth instead of just an oblique one, as he cradled her body in his arms. Even more than the speech itself, though, I liked what it did to his “At least we’ll die with harness on our back” - which became a sort of valediction to her, a squaring of Macbeth’s shoulders before battle, in order to do her proud. I’m not sure it was worth the rest of the production to get to that moment, however.