Something Wicked This Way Comes

On Wednesday I took Marisa, for her birthday, to see a Broadway production of Macbeth at the Lyceum Theater, starring Captain Jean-Luc Pic....I mean, Patrick Stewart. While I certainly enjoy a good Shakespeare movie, I certainly read more novels than plays so I can't consider myself a drama critic or even a theater enthusiast. But, I know a thing or two about storytelling and I certainly can appreciate a director’s take of a dark story like this one.

This Macbeth is on a limited run, and if you have any opportunity to see it, consider it seeing it. It’s very good. There, that’s my short review. For more, read on!

The Setting: Like most Shakespeare productions these days, the director opted to relocate the geography and timeframe of the story. (Not like those audacious directors who dare to set their Shakespeare plays in the time and place Shakespeare intended! My wife is one of those deviant renegades who thinks Shakespeare plays really ought to be set in the original locations. The gall!)

In this one, we find Macbeth's Scotland rendered with a considerably tyrannical, Stalinesque culture during a time of war. The men wear long Soviet-style coats, wield mid-20th century machine guns, and even don furred hats. The physical set itself was mostly unchanging: a subterranean industrial room with white, but grimy tiled walls, a sink, and a few racks. And which, depending on the scene, served as a kitchen, an asylum, a hospital, a torture chamber, or a morgue. Most dramatic entrances and exits came in the form of an old freight elevator at the back of the stage, complete with sliding black latticework doors.

I really appreciated this vision. My one criticism on the setting, and I may be alone in this, is that the text was not altered. It was still referred to as Scotland. I'm not a purist who thinks you can't tamper with Shakespeare's words to suit the environment; since they did trim lines away from certain characters here and there, why not just give Scotland a new name so we don't have conflicting ideas? Norway, Ireland, and England are all referred to as well, so why not change this, real subtle-like? Personally, I like the idea of a fictional country that shares some traits with a few familiar real world cultures. In fact, I seem to remember writing a story set in such a place.

The fact that the set did not change—only the people, the costumes, the props, and the lighting changed—was impressive. The assassins that Macbeth sends after his erstwhile friend Banquo did their foul deed on a train. With the proper lighting, they were able to simulate the look and sound of a train coach, other passengers sitting in their seats, and the sudden screech and stop when someone pulled the emergency chord. And yet there was no change in the set in doing so.

The Characters: As one would hope, Patrick Stewart is no starship captain here. He's a professional who knows how to keep his characters apart. In fact, in an interview he was asked if Captain Picard taught him anything for playing Macbeth. His answer: "I am proud of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I am proud of the work we did, and I am proud of the character I played, because I know for a fact he’s been an outstanding role model to people. Is there any of him in Macbeth? No. There really isn’t. Jean-Luc Picard, supposing he were married to Lady Macbeth — which he would never have been because he is married to the Enterprise, as we all know — he would never have permitted these things to happen because he is not a violent man, and not a man who would put personal ambition before the good of others."

That said, he was a surprisingly soft Macbeth, loud only when he needed to be, more than a little crazy, and the picture of world-weariness (or war-weariness). My wife thinks perhaps his acting was a bit too "tired," a little too comfortable and at ease, but he still made a solid performance. Also, he was mustachioed; that made him look even more villainous, as it always does.

Lady Macbeth was excellent, better in her final, sleepwalking hour than in her slightly over-the-top ambitious self from the first act. My wife has a particular fondness for the part, since she herself performed Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene in a Shakespeare festival long ago, and while she was critical about the show, she was still genuinely impressed and satisfied to see that she and Kate Fleetwood (who played Lady Macbeth in this production) agreed on the depiction. The rest of the cast——thanes, soldiers, servants——were very well acted. My wife especially liked MacDuff in this production, too. He was a bit over dramatic, but even a glance at Shakespeare's lines for that character shows that he really is supposed to be. Oh, and Lady MacDuff was the "good guy" female lead from Total Recall. Hah! That's two sci-fi actors in this show.

Who were my favorite characters? The witches! The "Weird Sisters." Why? Because they were young, hollow-eyed hospital nurses with knives and syringes and creepy chants, and because they bore witness to most of the events of the story intermingled with the other characters. They were flowing around the action as normal people, but whenever Macbeth was alone with them they became a coven of eerie psychotic sisters, moving with freaky posture and speaking in their sing-songy fashion about portentous events. When Macbeth consults with them a second time later in the play, rather than directly contacting their goddess for further information, they animate corpses in body bags in the morgue to speak for them. Yeah, good stuff.

Overall: Again, I'm not a critic, nor have I seen too many Shakespearean shows for real——mostly movies. So I don't have a strong basis for comparison, but I still felt this was a very strong production with some true Shakespearean actors. Patrick Stewart was good, but then he usually is. He convincingly role-played someone quite different than you're used to seeing in him. This ain't Professor Xavier. Another thing that he did well was externalize the reluctance of Macbeth. I knew the basic story and I've read the play before, but I felt I had a greater grasp of it after seeing this. Macbeth might be full of murder and butchery, but there's more anticipation and reflection on the killing than the actual killing itself. Macbeth is a reluctant power-hungry man, pushed by his wife to commit hideous crimes a step or two further than he'd ever carry out under his own power. This play is so full of deliberation that if it was more of a comedy, Shakespeare could have titled it Much Ado About Murder. Of course, that's part of the genius of it, and it's in the writing. I like that Macbeth, the hero and the villain, is done in by his own delusions and guilt. Blinded by dreams and ambitions that aren't entirely of his own design (a bit of ambition + his wife's manipulations + the witches' prophecies), he gets himself decapitated by a man he thought he was supernaturally protected from. How cool! And yeah, they showed us the bloody, severed head at the end.

Not to digress, but my favorite scene was when Macbeth makes a sandwich in his kitchen while instructing two of his assassins on what they needed to do to kill Banquo. Or, as one review puts it, "Food, from game to gateaux, is everywhere and hints at the ravenous hunger for the throne. The moment when the cucumber-cool Macbeth makes a sandwich while enlisting men to kill Banquo is chilling and delicious." A little bit of humor, a fair amount of menace.

Oh, and one more thing I wanted to mention. The director actually used a little bit of music, grim choral half-songs and chants that involved the entire cast at a few choice points. The Weird Sisters, when they did their famous "double, double, toil and trouble" chant, was actually played out almost like a music video, with a wicked techno beat, lots of crazy lights and The Ring-like imagery projected onto the walls.