Macbeth
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Abigail Graham
Dramaturg Zoë Svendson
Designer Ti Green
Composer Osnat Scmool
Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Saturday 23rd September 2023, 19.30
CAST
Max Bennett – Macbeth
Matti Houghton – Lady Macbeth
Aaron Anthony- Macduff
Eleanor Wyld – Lady Macduff
Fode Simbo- Banquo
Callum Callaghan – witch / porter / murder
Ben Caplan – witch / doctor / murderer
Tamzin Griffin – Duncan / Siward
Joseph Payne- Malcolm
Lucy Reynolds – ensemble
Ferdy Roberts- witch / Seyton
Gabby Wong- Ross
MUSICIANS
Jonthan Andre
Sarah Dacey
Genevieve Dawson
Jakob Rokosz
Rebecca Thorn
For years the RSC and Globe chose the same plays. This year both are doing Macbeth and As You Like It. Both feature a female Duncan and here we are three weeks after the very long RSC version. This year David Tennant is doing it at the Donmar (no, you won’t get tickets), Ralph Fiennes is touring it in unconventional settings and Mike Noble is doing it for the English Touring Theatre. I reckon two will do me for 2023.
The RSC Macbeth was a great disappointment a few weeks earlier. This Globe one has the great virtue of being an hour shorter, but not much else. Often The Globe does something irritating with casting. Not really here. Queen Duncan was at least stately and commanding and Ross as a constant messenger was OK. It’s just yet another mediocre Macbeth. It seems the default position. I’m desperate for someone to do a meaningful production that looks good. This has been the worst year in my memory for Shakespeare. Not a single stunning one so far.
The fabric of the building is swathed in battleship grey and squared off. We lived in a flat in London like that. It turns out the landlord was ex-navy and had acquired some genuine naval grey paint. Every surface including ceilings was painted with it. It was like being in a submarine. Worse, this non-set reminds me of the school production of Murder in the Cathedral with a squared off set the same colour. A lot about it reminded me of that dull sixth form production.
The costumes are modern dress and mainly plain black. Queen Duncan (Tamzin Griffin) is in white, the three male witches are in white haz-mat coveralls with beaked masks. Macbeth (Max Bennett) gets red later, and later still a tartan bomber jacket, and Lady Macbeth (Matti Houghton) gets a blue nylon top with a split skirt. It’s a most unattractive costume, but maybe they’re lampooning Queen Camilla.
Seyton, an omnipresent character here, gets light brown tweeds – the only costume that struck me as interesting. Seyton supervises the murders, a Peter Mandelson to Macbeth’s Tony Blair. He has to deal with Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness. Ferdy Robert’s does the stately serious civil servant brilliantly (and is also a witch). He is the one thing I will remember as a useful addition to the story and he doesn’t even need lines.
Macbeth appears in full Charles III coronation robes and crown which is supposed to be a comment. Later he wears just the crown over a bare chest and underpants. A tip. We spent time in acting classes lifting a stage weight and walking with it, then lifting and carrying empty bags as if they were the same weight. So do not lift a heavy gold crown with the tip of your little finger, even if it is meant to be a sarky comment on royalty.
Otherwise, all the costume is utterly boring. It will run away with worst set and costume design for 2023. I liked the fact that the production photos are actually in production and we can see the audience. They’re more vibrant than staged ones.
The special bit is that the male witches and Seyton push the deceased around on hospital gurneys which is one way of getting rid of characters killed on stage too- they die onto them. Then the trolleys are used to reveal the banquet. This banquet had no guests, with Macbeth pretending the audience were the guests. It was a very weak banquet scene.
The witches are played for comedy, with the Part Two opening Hubble bubble toil and trouble being genuinely funny, with an electric blender replacing the cauldron and the ingredients plucked from a realistic burnt and bloody corpse. Yes, it doesn’t look funny in cold print, but they draw plenty of laughter. They also produce the three children (Fleance, Young Macduff, Young Siward) from a large container one at a time to chant the predictions. That worked well and the young actors did the lines well too. It was the best scene for me, but hardly typical or fitting to the play.
It is a huge change to see males getting roles which are written as female nowadays. It is always the other way round. The programme note on reversing the misogyny of witch persecution was superfluous. You don’t have to explain everything in agendas, Just cast men in the roles and let the performance say it. It’s not a problem.
Callum Callaghan as the Porter was an object lesson on how to do it compared to the RSC’s rewritten text delivered in incomprehensible Glaswegian. This Porter was excellent, adding just enough modern touches and business in his hi-vis jacket while at least retaining the shape and intent of the original.
Near the start they were getting good audience participation, having everyone chanting Hail Hail then the audience joining the cast in clapping, but then they seemed to forget all about it when it was working and the audience were enjoying it. Why abandon it?
Joseph Payne was an effective young and terrified Malcolm, with no brother to bounce off from.
I was surprised at reviews which made much of it being obvious here that the Macbeths had lost a child. I first read the play (around the class) at fourteen, and I knew that then (I have given suck …). They did bring on Lady MacDuff and her son and Banquo and son for the Macbeths to look at jealously, which was a good idea. It strikes me now that the Macbeths must have known they weren’t going to have another child. How? Shakespeare wasn’t going to mention it, but a king of Macbeth’s era, concerned over succession, would have gone for the Henry VIII solution to a childless wife.
The jealousy aspect was enhanced by having Lady MacDuff as heavily pregnant, and guess where the murderers stabbed her.
The spontaneous applause was reserved for the end of Matti Houghton doing Lady Macbeth’s final ‘out damn spot’ scene. She gave it the full welly, no holding back. That amount of sheer energy deserved applause. She was a tremendous feisty and vigorous Hermia at the RSC a dozen years ago and she still has the power.
Max Bennett’s Macbeth was supposed to be mad, or become mad, and dies a very quick coward’s death-a welcome change from the interminable fight in the RSC version. I liked that death scene, though partly because it meant the end was nigh. Some killings were very well executed, I mean, done – Young MacDuff, Young Siward, Macbeth. The younger ones drew shocked breaths from the audience. Great blood from nowhere on Macbeth’s death, which is hard onto bare skin, but they must squirt it out of the knife.
Saturday night and it was full. They got lots of applause at the curtain call. The Americans in front of us stood instantly, as is the standard habit in American theatres. Of course they did, though when they’d finished grazing on their highly odiferous pulled beef and onion brioches (on sale in the courtyard) at the beginning two of them spent the first half glued to their Smartphones which was a distracting light in our peripheral vision. I think they were following the text on the phone rather than watching the stage, the phone version is the REAL version after all, rather than the actors emoting hard in front of them. In the second part, the woman abandoned her phone and flicked through the programme instead. As it was cut, and well cut too, following it on the phone would have been arduous.
Not everyone excelled in speaking the lines. Blame the director, it was not her priority. The actors should have been able to do it with the right detail line direction. It’s Shakespeare. You’re expected to get that bit right. Some could anyway (Tamzin Griffith as Duncan could). The Lady Macbeth speech was most impressive, populist stuff, but histrionic.
I squirmed in the Tomorrow and tomorrow speech, and sorry, that’s as badly as I’ve seen it interpreted. Again,I don’t blame the actor for the concept there, but delivering it bare chested in black underpants is a mountain to climb. And you’re really, really not supposed to play for laughs at this point. The original text opted for just one tension breaking comic scene. You can’t undermine the ending with cheap laughs.
Musicians? Mainly that meant singers. The MD seemed to be sitting in front of computer screens and there was synth bass and drums at times. Then drums emitted from the balcony above us not the stage, so I assume recorded / synthetic. Emma Rice got castigated for swathing the set, and for having electronic loops for music. No one is castigating anymore. The difference is Emma Rice did it well.
I don’t think it was as misguided as the RSC one. Lots of effort. They used the space of the pit well, with three platforms used by the witches and Macbeth.
I always applaud the cast but much of it was partly a feast of ham acting. It’s inevitable given the size of the space and open air that you have to play ‘large’ and I shouldn’t compare acting styles with the tiny intimate Ustinov Studio last time we were in a theatre. The production reeked ‘cheap’ though – reduced cast, no decent set or costume. I have some sympathy with The Globe here. It’s self-funded, and the opposite is the taxpayer funded National Theatre with an outsize cast, unscripted extras, fantastic sets. However, The Globe has to realize that a lot of its funding is tourist trade. There are always many foreign visitors in the audience … some will get £5 standing tickets, watch for ten minutes and leave because they can’t understand the words and only wanted to see inside. For others, it’s the high point of their trip to London. Most Macbeths are modern dress, but at The Globe, you need a very good reason for not doing at least a semblance of Shakespearean era costume.
Yet another under achieving Macbeth, I don’t know if I’ll bother with the play again. Poor versions outweigh the few good ones. I should add that with two stars from me they are in good company on this play. Though Karen opts for just one star.
I was going for two and then I read the programme note by Zoe Svendson, dramaturg for this production and lecturer in drama at Cambridge (not noted as a drama school, though people who were NOT studying drama there and acting in Footlights did well.) They seem to analyse political intent rather than, say, teach acting or production.
Quotes
Macbeth represents the emerging capitalist order –
This rationalism which came to define the logic of capitalism has brought us the climate crisis –
European colonialism was reshaping the world – built on a culture of cultivation in complete ignorance and denigration of the practices of non-Europeans –
The misogyny of witch hunts and the racism of white supremacy are thus closely entwined-
Human means white male classically educated and able-bodied –
The food we eat from beef to chocolate is driving deforestation –
OK, so Shakespeare’s point is that we should be vegan and the black hats and cloaks portrayed on female witches is misogynist and racist? So dress them in white and make them male? That Macbeth is about white colonisation (sorry, Dr Svendson, you’re confused. That one’s called The Tempest). Shakespeare uses ‘we sisters’ but witch can be male anyway. In the 17th century men too were accused of witchcraft. The automatic female identification may stem from Salem where 14 of the 19 executed for witchcraft were female (but then 5 were male), and that was nearly ninety years after Macbeth was written. In Normandy, over the late 16th and 17th centuries, 70% of those accused of witchcraft were male. So why did they keep the line ‘we sisters’ ? If you can talk about Queen Duncan, you can use ‘we brothers.’
I was under the misapprehension that the play was about guilt and how one evil deed forces people to greater evil deeds. I thought that in 1606, it was drumming home that regicide was an unforgivable sin., and the doer would receive a comeuppance. I thought the predictions were about inevitability and fate (compare the appointment in Samara story). The witches are there because James I had written a book on witchcraft in 1597 while James VI of Scotland and was obsessed with them. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the Kings Men in 1603, and each was given red cloth to wear in the coronation procession in 1604. Under James I their performances at court had doubled. The play was commercially motivated, a king pleaser for a Scottish monarch, but being Shakespeare, it was a great tale that became one of his most popular and accessible plays.
Might I suggest that tragedy is not suitable for the Globe space, certainly not under this management. You can’t play the ending for cheap laughs with Macbeth bare chested with a crown pushed on stage sitting on a gurney in underpants. Then you produce a po-faced laughably right-on programme article to justify it. I will say that the other programme essay on assassination and political murder by Alexandra Ganda is good history. But then she’s at Oxford. My loyalties are dark blue.
The absurd programme notes by Svendson revealing their intentions should reduce it to one star but that’s unfair to the cast and while her notes are utter nonsense, mainly we had no idea of her subtext which fortunately remained in her mind. Many won’t buy a copy. I’d advise that unless you want a laugh. On the downside, we discussed it, and couldn’t see ourselves renewing our Globe membership after this play BUT then the next day at The Globe was to bring As You Like It the best Shakespeare production we’ve seen this year.
**
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
four star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian ****
three star
Victoria Segal, The Sunday Times, ***
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
“If only this production had spent as much time honing the actors’ verse as it had thinking about ‘colonial destruction”
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, ***
Fiona Mountford, The i, ***
Time Out ***
Sam Marlowe, The Stage ***
two star
Nick Curtis, The Standard **
Clive Davis, The Times **
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
MACBETH
- Macbeth, RSC 2011 Jonathan Slinger as Macbeth
- Macbeth – McAvoy 2013, Trafalgar Studio, James McAvoy 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
- Macbeth, Chichester 2019, John Simm as Macbeth
- Macbeth, RSC 2023 Reuben Joseph as Macbeth
- Macbeth, Globe 2023 Max Bennett as Macbeth
MAX BENNETT
‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, Wanamaker Playhouse 2014
King Lear, Frank Langella, Chichester 2013(Edmund)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Headlong 2011 (Demetrius)
MATTI HOUGHTON
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC 2011 (Hermia)
The City Madam, RSC 2011
Cardenio, RSC 2011
AARON ANTHONY
The Motive & The Cue, National Theatre 2023
ELEANOR WYLD
Leopoldstadt, London 2020
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndham’s Theatre, 2017
Doctor Faustus, RSC 2016
Don Quixote, RSC 2016
JOSEPH PAYNE
The Tempest, RSC 2023
TAMZIN GRIFFIN
Present Laughter, Chichester 2018
FERDY ROBERTS
A Midsummer Nights Dream, Filter on tour 2011
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