Macbeth: A Review

Kenneth Branagh has a new "Macbeth" for the Manchester International Shakespeare Festival. Done on the stage, it was sent as film to several American cities and shown with limited engagements. Here it was shown twice.

This is an unusual play for Shakespeare; it almost comes off as an experiment. While set in feudal Scotland--perhaps appropriately primitive in English eyes--it is meant to play much older. It is as close to Greek as Shakespeare gets. Prophecies, witches, and brooding Fate all hang on the stage like a fog as Macbeth and his wife encounter a single challenge, murderous ambition, accept it and are relentlessly destroyed by it. It is a high schooler's dream: A clean flaw with personifications of Fate floating around. The only thing missing is the chorus. Some think Coriolanus is the prototype Shakespearean tragedy but, if it is, this is a close second. This version is played with an emphasis on Macbeth and his wife as a fated couple rather than the usual tension between them. (I confess I prefer the latter.)

This production, while very good, has a number of problems. It opens with Lady Macbeth praying at an alter with a huge crucifix above. This is at least a surprising image. Macbeth is as pagan a play as Shakespeare could write. Indeed it is self-consciously so. While Macbeth and his wife are rightly condemned for their errors, their fate is really out of their hands. The witches do not give advise about how he could become king, they predict it. None of the old "The fault...... is not in our stars, But in ourselves" stuff here. Macbeth and his wife do not have a chance, no more than Oedipus does. While the wife is certainly more prone to failings, hate her or not, she is doomed by her stars. Only the most militant of Calvinists could put Lady Macbeth on her knees before the cross at the beginning of the play.

The stage is unusual and generally works. It is reminiscent of a horse paddock, a long strip of soft ground between two tiers of audience. While one worries about the footing through the play, it is not a terrible distraction. The proximity of the audience, especially in this intense, violent play, is distracting and I think was a bad idea. There are constant efforts to connect Shakespeare with modern society--intermingled audiences and actors, women playing men, racial-blind casting, updating scenes and props and costumes--but the failure for the genius of Shakespeare to be popular is probably "not in our presentation but in ourselves."

The casting is terrific. Branagh is simply wonderful and there is not a weak player among the rest. The witches (although I wish their enunciation had been allowed to be better), Banquo, Macduff's child and especially Macduff, are particularly good. Lady Macbeth is wonderful but an error; she is simply too old a choice for a king planning a dynasty. The comedic scene with the porter was shockingly--and revealingly--inadequate; without an intermission in the play, efforts at comic relief seemed an afterthought or a sop. It was as if, for a moment, someone who had been screaming for an hour suddenly stopped.

This is a relentless, intense, harrowing play. It is hard to imagine it being acceptable entertainment to a casual society used to passive, short distractions. One worries that this high level of art may have a limited future; like opera or the symphony, it might be supported as a charity by a few, patronized by fewer and become, museum-like, an interesting example of a high quality period in the gradual waning of our aesthetic achievements. That said, one can only hope that Branagh continues to do this, if only to stock the museum with high quality so that those of us who care about this dying art can visit it occasionally.