Peter Viney's Blog

Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

Directed by Paul Miller
Designed by Simon Daw
Lighting Designer Mark Doubleday
Music and sound Max Pappenheim

Chichester Festival Theatre
Saturday 28th September 2019, 14.30

CAST

John Simm – Macbeth
Dervla Kirwan – Lady Macbeth

with

Heider Ali-  Angus / murderer / English doctor
Michael Balogun – MacDuff
Jacob Blazdel  – Fleance
David Burnett – Wounded captain / Murderer / Montieth
Roseanna Francona – weird sister
Leah Gayer – weird sister
Lauren Grace- weird sister
Stuart Laing – Banquo
Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawao – Ross
Avital Lvova – Lennox
Harvey McGuinness – Fleance
Matthew O’Shea – Young MacDuff
Harry Peacock- Porter / Siward
Noah Peirson – Young MacDuff
Isabel Pollen – Lady MacDuff / Gentlewoman
Christopher Ravenscroft – Duncan / Doctor
Beatriz Romilly- Malcolm
Nathan Welsh – Donalblain

Macbeth has been high in the collective with productions that we’ve seen in the last four years from Tara Arts, The Young Vic, The Globe, The National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Wanamaker Playhouse and The Watermill. A tale of backstabbing and treacherous plotting relates to our experience in these times. We spent a happy ten minutes on the way home casting it for both political parties. It worked for both.

Chichester has one of the best stages in the country, rivalling the Olivier Theatre at the National, so we anticipated a spectacular production of a play that was disappointing last year at both the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A Shakespeare tragedy being performed in the Festival Theatre? Before I started these reviews, we saw Patrick Stewart in Macbeth at Chichester, in the smaller intimate Minerva Theatre, then he switched to Malvolio for Twelfth Night and the comedy was placed on the big Festival Theatre stage. Ian McKellan chose the Minerva’s smaller space for his Chichester King Lear in 2017 and that sold so fast that even an hour into Friend’s Advance booking, we couldn’t get seats next to each other. Dervla Kirwan played Goneril in that one,  Romeo and Juliet (with Emily Blunt before she became a major film star) was on the large stage too, as were the recent RSC transfers of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. Macbeth was the first Shakespeare I studied at school, and it was often the “starter” at all-boys schools in the 60s, as Romeo & Juliet was at all-girls schools. Well, the National and RSC sold seats easily with Macbeth. That combined with the fact Chichester could have sold McKellan’s Lear several times over may have prompted the big stage choice. Like the National and RSC they chose two major actors as leads and give them star billing in publicity.

Chichester was one of the last bastions of “appropriate gender” (like how it was written) casting, and now they too have succumbed to having four females in what should be male parts. Eight adult males. Eight adult females.  So we have the dreaded Globe compulsion on 50% women in Shakespeare. I agree on 50 / 50 over the season, which the RSC can do by choosing the plays. It’s daft to do it in every play, especially one about war and fighting. Oddly, the children here are all male – with children it’s easy to swap. Switching the odd background lord to become a lady doesn’t matter at all, though not ALL of them.  They didn’t do that. They had women playing the roles as men. Here we have a female Malcolm too, referred to as “he.”. It definitely distracts from the male world of thuggish soldiers it should portray. Apparently the new PC description is “Integrated casting.” Humph.

It’s a huge stage. Look at the size of their casts in musicals on this stage with its huge audience … you don’t need to double parts. But they did. They needed four or five more actors in this space. 50/50 casting can work, and did with the Watermill version of the play this year. That’s because you know there is a set ensemble of ten in a confined space, working in repertory with a comedy and you accept the women playing men and doubling and tripling up as necessity. On a stage which had just done Oklahoma with a huge cast plus a large live orchestra, you don’t make that allowance.

The staging is at the minimal end of minimalist. They have a glass stage with rocky ground below the glass (I think it’s left over from Plenty). It can be under-lit, and slid apart to dispose of dead bodies and to produce a roaring fire for the weird sisters in the second part.

At the back is a gauze, that can be opened in the centre and can be used as a projection screen. When actors are lit from behind you can see through it as with the welcoming banquet for Duncan. When we came in, it looked like a mirror because we could see the audience, ourselves, looking back, but I suspect that was projected from a live camera.

The lighting design and projection star. This is the final battle scene with the opponents shouting from the auditorium. Fantastic lighting, shame about the lack of action.

Technically, lighting is complex and first rate. At times, follow spots appeared in the gangways to catch Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Two white spots hit the ghostly face of Banquo, people are isolated in lights. Given a glass floor and a reflective background and projection going on at the same time means this is state-of-the-art precision work. A minor gripe … powerful LED torches held by actors is a 2019 habit. It can be annoying as where Fleance’s torch was directly in my eyes for long enough for me to have to hold my hands over them and miss the action.

Video projection in the later witches scene. Glass stage open. This is the best bit in the entire play.

Projection is used most of the time – often it’s abstract tree shapes, but even when it’s a solid blank back wall, that will be projected. Either there is projection, or you can see through to scenes behind the gauze. Projection is used to great effect when characters from the play … MacDuff, Malcolm … appear to voice the witches prophecies about Birnaum Wood, and projection is used to show the parade of Banquo’s descendants as kings.

There is also a low level of background music and sound effects most of the time, including below the major speeches. It didn’t intrude, but the cast had head mics. It is a very large theatre. We were at the front but I have been at the very back and struggled a bit to hear some voices. At the front we had little awareness of “amplified sound” and it sounded natural. (Not so elsewhere … see the linked comments below), Maybe they just lift it for further back. In the final scenes when the army has arrived. people are speaking from the upper balcony surrounding us and that sounded definitely loudly microphone. Incidentally, that positioning kind of works at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre as long as you’re not sitting right under a gallery. The same at The Globe … you often can’t see actors above you because of the roof. Here, while there’s less obstruction, it requires an awful lot of twisting and turning. I’m dubious about using it for major interactions.

John Simm as Macbeth

The production was heavily soliloquy centred, and heavily lead focussed on John Simm and Dervla Kirwan, at the front of the stage much of the time. Hi-tech 19th century actor manager style? Too often, just as at the National and RSC theatres in 2018, they cast stellar lead actors as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, rely on them to deliver the goods, and don’t take enough care of the rest. Here too.

Macbeth (back to us) greets King Duncan. Note glass stage reflective effect

The costumes were late 19th / early 20th with puttees on the soldiers and greatcoats abounding. Dervla Kirwan got nice enough gowns though they looked from a much earlier era. Costume ranged from mediocre to abysmal – the guy in the tightly-belted bright brown coat with dark moustache looked so comical like a detective from Tin-Tin. Ross’s extremely unflattering pale green costume really accentuated the fact that it was a woman pretending to be a man. But not one of the women playing men came out well, or even acceptable. We have seen Beatriz Romilly do good work as a woman, but why cast her as a man? It is bound to fail. She plays Malcolm as weedy, turning away, hankie to mouth as Macbeth’s bloody exploits against the enemy are described. But then she has to lead an army, and we saw far too much of her long dull scene with MacDuff in England, and it is a scene you can cut heavily, and you should, and most directors do. The point is Ross’s news to MacDuff about his wife and children. Get to it faster. Michael Balogun as MacDuff was particularly good once he had the news.

The weird sisters are a major part of this one. Their costumes are the best of a bad lot too. They open the play, they do amazing fast circling running. They play minor parts such as delivering messages, with the addition of a coat and hat, but then remove the hat and let their hair hang loose, so we know they are the witches. The idea for us was that the witches were manipulating the action of the play throughout; setting Macbeth up.  They watch some of the action, crouched around the stage. We both thought the way the witches was done was a strong positive.

Dervla Kirwan and John Simm in the “Banquo banquet” scene

The major reason for booking is John Simm. His speeches are beautifully pitched. The banquet with Banquo scene is as good as you can get, full marks to Stuart Laing as Banquo too in this scene and especially to the lighting guys for keeping Banquo’s face in dead white spotlight. Simm was powerful in this. Great acting. Great scene. He is not a natural physical war leader, looking more office manager than warrior king. What you do is create a sense of power by giving him a couple of burly brutal looking guards and a better costume. They didn’t.

Macbeth reports the murder of Duncan to Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth’s first scene didn’t work for me at all. She did not contextualize that she was reading a letter from Macbeth. There were back-projected scraps of words. If you didn’t know that it was a message, it was nonsense. Just about the weakest “first Lady Macbeth scene” I can remember. Dirvla Kirwan made up for it later with a particularly lovely reading of Lady Macbeth’s’ “all the perfumes of Arabia” speech.

When Duncan is having his banquet, silently behind the gauze, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth come to the front platform to plot while we see the dinner party in the far background … not the first time it’s been done this way. They added MacDuff, standing at the end of the table with a glass of wine, not joining in the dinner but watching Macbeth and Lady Macbeth intently. A good indicator of things to come and impressive … BUT then MacDuff is the one doing the knocking off … sorry knocking on the doors and waking the porter and discovering the murder. So I was left thinking, ‘Was he at the dinner or not?’ He was meant to be MacDuff at the back, and with his bald head and unusual beard shape, he can’t double.

The murderers were good. David Burnett did the wounded captain who opens the play, and that was especially good.

It was two and a half hours plus interval, which is long for Macbeth. It felt long too. Insufficient cutting of words coupled with insufficient action. The eventual killing of Macbeth right at the back behind the gauze was extremely weak. There was no battle. The sword fighting was very limited.

MacDuff (Michael Balogun) and Macbeth (John Simm) fight it out at the end

It’s inherently 3 star. Simm’s speeches were so excellent, his performance 5 star (we have said exactly this about the other recent lead actor centred versions!), and the lighting plot was 5 star, but the rest of the play didn’t match that standard. Cruelly, I’m tempted to minus one star from the 3 for the dreadful 50 / 50 casting and because it was so ‘talk centred’ and lacking in interaction, it was often tedious. That would be unfair.

***

THE PROGRAMME

An essay on how power corrupts was good, but I would have liked to know the director’s concept, or John Simms’ thoughts and  motivation for playing it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
4 star
Debbie Gilpin, Broadway World ****

3 star

Michael Billington, The Guardian ***

John Simm is a fine actor and gives an intelligent, well thought out performance as the Scottish thane. Paul Miller’s production, however, does nothing to alter my conviction that this work is best played in a small space sans intermission. Macbeth should hurtle to his doom rather than, as here, being part of a three-hour spectacle. Sight and sound tend to dominate.  

Fiona Mountford, Telegraph ***

Both offer decent but not definitive performances, yet there is no sense of the crucial couple-chemistry that should blaze under all the best productions like a roaring Bunsen burner. We get little sense of their complicity as co-conspirators and Simm, who introduces his character as a bluff no-nonsense soldier, appears decidedly more at ease as Macbeth heads into his later, more isolated scenes. It’s a detailed but underpowered production from director Paul Miller, with the cast dressed in loosely early 20th-century garb, rendered peculiarly bloodless in the first two acts by the fact that there is almost no shouting or raised voices.

Gareth Carr, What’s on Stage ***

There is much to like about this production – with fine staging and technically proficient performances from its two stars, but it lacks the teeth and grit needed to evoke much in the way of necessary horror.

Susan Elkins, Sardines ***
Matt, In The Cheap Seats ***

As Simm starts to speak you can hear a pin drop but for some reason the speech is amplified and given an echo effect when all that is needed is to hear such a good actor deliver one of the best loved pieces in Shakespeare’s plays. Come then for those masterful central performances, they’re more than worth the price of admission even if so much of the rest is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Great final line, wish I’d thought of it!

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

MACBETH

• Macbeth – McAvoy 2013, Trafalgar Studio, James McAvoy as Macbeth
• Macbeth, RSC 2011 Jonathan Slinger as Macbeth
• Macbeth – Tara Arts 2015 (Shakespeare’s Macbeth) on tour, Poole Lighthouse
• Macbeth, Young Vic, 2015
• Macbeth – Globe 2016, Ray Fearon as Macbeth
• Macbeth, RSC 2018, Christopher Ecclestone as Macbeth
• Macbeth, National Theatre 2018, Rory Kinnear as Macbeth
• Macbeth, Wanamaker Playhouse 2018, Paul Ready as Macbeth
• Macbeth, Watermill, 2019. Billy Postlethwaite as Macbeth

PAUL MILLER
French Without Tears, by Terence Rattigan, English Touring Theatre 2016

JOHN SIMM
The Hot House, Harold Pinter, Trafalgar Studio 2013
The Homecoming, Harold Pinter, Trafalgar Studio 2015

DERVLA KIRWAN
King Lear, Chichester 2017 (Goneril)

BEATRIZ ROMILLY
Much Ado About Nothing, Globe 2017
French Without Tears, by Terence Rattigan, English Touring Theatre 2016
Henry VI: Three Plays Globe on tour 2013 (Joan of Arc)

DAVID BURNETT
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
Julius Caesar, RSC 2017
Antony & Cleopatra, RSC 2017

Michael Balogun was the doctor in the National Theatre Macbeth last year, but he was replaced by an understudy the day we saw it.