4 STARS, March 17-24. As winter's fire rages outside, Richard Nye enjoys an accomplished performance of Macbeth by the Richmond Shakespeare Society
As without, so within. Outside an unseasonal snowstorm, mocking the onset of spring, speaks softly of a time out of joint; while inside the dark, distempered Scotland of 11th century myth settles eerily upon the present. It is a night for confusion, for the supernatural, for encountering strange sisters upon blasted heaths.
And indeed here they come, though not exactly as you might have expected them, bearing iPhones and talking techno before donning their hideous masks. Nor is this a mere flight of fancy: contradiction, asserts director John Buckingham in his programme notes, is at the very heart of Shakespeare’s greatness. And so this RSS production of Macbeth is consciously endowed with a strong metatheatrical dimension. Now is then and then is now, our audience engagement with character, plot and meaning offset by a studied subversion; a deliberate drip feed of reminders that we are, after all, snuggled up in a cosy local theatre, watching a play.
In working through such contradictions, writes Buckingham, it is “easy to be overcome with fear, like Macbeth, and ask ‘If we should fail?’ There is consolation in Lady Macbeth’s simple response to this: ‘We fail.’” But this production does not fail – though there are times, methinks, when the director doth innovate too much. Macbeth’s rendering of the climactic “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, with the final word accompanied by a shameless visual pointer to the metatheatrical context, is more sound and whimsy than sound and fury, signifying virtually nothing. But no matter. Small failings are swallowed up in the overall effect, the modern and the medieval bleakly fused into an atmosphere of menace, mystery and threat.
As ever with the RSS, there is a raft of fine performances. Guy Holloway is a strikingly reflective Macduff, Scott Tilley alternately thuggish and tormented in the title role, fitfully self-aware as dire thought hardens into irrevocable deed and puts the path of honour beyond recall. And take a deep bow, Dionne King. One should not lightly shed a tear for Lady Macbeth, most monstrous among the regiment of women. Tonight, however, no soul could have remained unmoved through the sleepwalking, handwashing scene – the distorted, candlelit Gethsemane that prefaces her doom – as the unpayable debt of fear and guilt congealed into broken utterance: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
And this, amidst a sea of equivocation and duplicity, is the enduring lesson of Macbeth: that evil devours its own. The eponymous villain is a vanquished Scottish king brought low before his medieval castle walls. But he could just as well be Hitler in his bunker, or Harvey in Hollywood, or anyone for whom the seeming protections of power have finally failed, the flimsy fortress of immunity and self-deception breached by unpitying truth. Quite apart from its temporal tricksiness, this production captures beautifully that despair. Like the deposed and desecrated Duncan, Macbeth is a man summoned by a bell: a knell that promises a delusory dream of heaven, underscored by all the frothing hubble-bubble of hell.
- Check out our Theatre/Arts Section for more great local theatre news, reviews and interviews
- You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates on all our latest articles
- Sign up to our Weekly Newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and stories
- Looking to advertise your business in Surrey or SW London? Check out our 11 different lifestyle magazines with a combined monthly distribution of over 210,000 AB1 homes
