Peter Viney's Blog

by William Shakespeare
Director Wils Wilson
Designer Georgia McGuinness
Music- Alasdair Macrae
Porter’s speech rewritten by Stewart Lee

Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Friday 1st September, 2023 19.30

Reuben Joseph – Macbeth
Valene Kane- Lady Macbeth
Anna Russell-Martin – Banquo
Liam King- Fleance
Therese Bradley- Duncan, Queen of Scotland
Shyvonne Ahmed – Malcolm
Amelia Isaac Jones – Donalblain
George Anton – Macduff
Kevin Lennon – Lennox
Ryan Hunter- Ross
Benjamin Osugo- Angus
Alison Peebles – porter / Seyton
Emma King – Anne, Lady Macduff
Liam King – Colm Macduff
Annie Grace – Alice / Owen
Alasdair Macrae -Bloody captain / murderer
Michael Wallace – Guan (murderer)
Therese Bradley – Clyde (murder)
Therese Bradley – Siward
Michael Wallace – Young Siward
The witches
Amber Syvia Edwards – witch
Dylan Read- witch
Eilidh Loan – witch

MUSIC
Annie Grace- bagpipes / whistles / voice
Anna Carter- tuba
Aaron Diaz – sousaphone / trumpet
Elinor Peregrin – bass trombone / bass trumpet / euphonium / keyboard
Kevin Waterman – percussion
Alasdair MaCrae – saw / hammered dulcimer / electric guitar / violin

Running time: 3 hours 25 minutes (including interval). Isn’t this the shortest tragedy? As Mark Lawson points out, it’s a full third longer than most productions, despite text trimming:

One reason is elongation of the stage directions. The final battle between Macbeth and Macduff, described in a single line, seems to go on as long as the Somme.
Mark Lawson, The Guardian 31 August 2023

I have a negative feeling going in. Will it persist? There is a point where gender neutral is plain daft. Back in my early days, Macbeth was the chosen first Shakespeare play for boys’ schools because it’s violent, male stuff. Well, state schools. Public schools preferred Julius Caesar. Now we have female Malcolm, Duncan, Donalblain, Porter, Banquo. Do girls go to drama school saying, ‘one day I’ll do Portia / Cleopatra / Titania / Lady Anne / Hermia / Helena / Rosalind / Viola,’ or do they say, ‘one day I might be Banquo, or Malcolm.’ There ARE plenty of great female Shakespearean roles. However, the majority of other (lesser) parts are male. Some plays convert to 50/50 pretty well. Not this one. The casting was absurd,

I do hope this is the last gasp of the old increasingly agenda-ridden regime which reached its nadir this year with Julius Caesar, the worst professional Shakespeare production in my memory. Hopefully the incoming artistic directors will restore just a degree of suitable casting instead of blinkered agenda casting. Type casting, perhaps? I also don’t recognize the actors’ names here. Is that good or bad?

The publicity proclaims their Scottishness. However, James I / VI didn’t parade around in tartan and kilts and it’s questionable whether Shakespeare knew about Scottish fancy dress, particularly as so much of it was invented by Sir Walter Scott in the 1820s. The Scottish play doesn’t need to be Scottish, unless you’re going for claymores and kilts.

It is said to be a future Scottish dystopia, The modern/ future dystopia elements are a pistol to shoot the first Thane of Cawdor, and some bizarre business setting up a generator to power lights over the banquet. That comes from nowhere. Then we have electric buzzers instead of thumping on castle doors. The porter’s in a modern mishmash. Yet mostly the costumes are going for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, aka the Japanese Macbeth. Not all, but Banquo, Malcolm, Macbeth (plus tartan). Banquo’s ghost even has a pale blue and gold Japanese cloak. In retrospect, I suppose the scattered rocks are like a Zen rock garden. The witches are like a Japanese play, so If that was the concept, why not follow it through to everyone? What was the “future dystopia” about? If that’s the intention, go for it, as the McAvoy Macbeth at the Trafalgar Studios did. Or go for Kurosawa.

The best bit by a mile was the music. Sousaphone, tuba, trombone, drums and above all swirling bagpipes. It was all presented on stage too and the musicians played some minor roles. It also gave the play a powerful start, accentuated by dead ravens dropping from above. The witches grow seemingly organically out of the centre stage and start the play (at some length). This looks impressive, they are impressive, but there will turn out to be a lot of them swirling about.

it wasn’t gender blind, We have Queen Duncan. Banquo is ‘she.’ However if we have a Queen, why will Banquo’s daughters be kings? Why does Lady Macbeth need to be a Cherie Blair / Hilary Clinton and push a dumber but more charismatic spouse into the leading role? If there are queens, why not just do it herself?

Then there are two truly awful moments. When Banquo is slain, Fleance calls out ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ Later the Macduff child calls ‘Mama! mama!’ Phew. Mama mia! Malcolm played by a woman kind of works. It’s been done before as it accentuates his / her / their youth. I never worked out if Malcolm was gender blind casting here or meant to be female. Donalblain was female. In the programme, Fleance is Banquo’s son, but Malcolm and Donalblain are Duncan’s eldest and youngest child. Shyvonne Ahmed as Malcolm was fine.

The programme adds first names for people we never knew the first names of. Lady Macbeth as Gruach? (Yes, but only if you’ve seen the modern sequel, Dunsinane). Colm Macduff? Guan and Clyde the murderers? Did you know Lady Macduff was Anne? What’s that about?

At least they have a beefy Macbeth in Reuben Joseph, and a very tough looking MacDuff in George Anton. It’s essential that these two look tough. It’s also essential that Banquo looks like a powerful soldier too, rather than a woman in Japanese male costume.

Reuben Joseph and Valene Kane are both powerful performances in the lead roles. Reuben Joseph brings an air of seething unexpected rage which helps. They’d have excelled in any production, but in this one excel because they don’t have a lot of competition.

The two great scenes are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth entering as king and queen to swirling bagpipe ad salutes all round, and Macbeth’s reactions in the banquet scene.

The Porter scene is new, written by Stewart Lee. I approve of riffing on clown scenes, as the originals were full of topical jokes that no longer work. I suspect the original companies had an outline text, with set points and lines and ending, and the player improvised in between, much as we worked in our ELT shows in the 70s. Writing a whole new stand up, complete with roadie with microphone is a giant step further. It’s more or less what The Globe did in The Winter’s Tale earlier this year- abandon the text altogether. It got laughs. I thought it dire, not because of the new text at all, but because Alison Peebles played it as if to the Glasgow Empire in the 1960s. We had got used to Scottish accents and the others were all clear, but she was extreme, she gabbled and was near incomprehensible. The point is that people accommodate and moderate their accents outside a close group. She did not at all. There are Scottish call centres which do the same. A non-Scots director would have said, ‘Bring it down 30%’ and she should have been able to while retaining the feel. I’d put on the understudy tomorrow.

The text isn’t great. She looked hilarious. Her delivery was dreadful. In the last two years EVERY Shakespeare clown squeezes in a Boris Johnson reference. It’s not enough. It has to be a funny and apposite Boris Johnson reference. ‘Boris’ in the theatre has become like saying ‘bum’ or ‘fart’ to a class of 6 year olds. Yes, they will laugh. The best laughs were about GCSE students coming to see it because their parents were rich enough to get the tickets to push them ahead of the poor kids, and they hadn’t read the play – Macbeth dies, she adds. While it was funny, the RSC taking the piss out of such sales, is crapping on your own doorstep. I did notice that because of her poorly articulated gabble (she clearly needed that microphone to project at all) the front rows were laughing way more than those above.

Then there’s the blood. The Macbeths have neatly red-stained fingers. It must be dry because it doesn’t get on her yellow dress. It stays there. Others involved in murder have equally neat painted fingers.

The Lady MacDuff murder is done by the witches controlling puppet babies which she is holding. The fact of “Colm” Macduff looking too old but dressed in a baby bonnet coupled with the anguished Mama! does not help the drama. I thought the scene was weaker than normal. It can and should be chilling and horrific.

The Macbeth / MacDuff brawl is exceedingly long. It is brutal, involved a lot of work, and they say audiences in the 17th century particularly cherished the fight scenes which would have been long and elaborate. However, at this point it was too much. Get on with it.

Long? An hour longer than most. It was ridiculously padded out. OK, there were good ideas, great looking sequences, but you can’t just keep adding stuff. There was no sense of flow or pace. Tonight it was exacerbated because an audience medical emergency right in the death of Duncan sequence (45 minutes in) had us all sent into the lobby for over half an hour. I was already critical of flow and pace well before that interruption. Given the overall length, one shouldn’t knock an extra pee break. It must have been serious, and it is a burden on the cast, stopping, cooling down and picking back up. They didn’t show it. Full marks particularly to Valene Kane who had to pick it up.

Lighting? There was a spotlight at stage level, used occasionally which hit us right in the eyes blindingly in row C. Bad lighting design. It’s not the first time the RSC has done that with a stage level light. You do not shine a powerful spotlight into the audience and keep it there.

Overall, I’m not in much doubt. The two,leads were excellent, the music absolutely superb, impressive start, good banquet and crowning procession. Those are the positives.

The casting undermines everything. Yes, the women run through the parts well but that’s not the point. They are clearly male roles. The accent is a total barrier for the Porter. Costume is puzzlingly inconsistent.  Good ideas abound, too many of them, but they result in muddying and confusion. It’s jerky.

The programme can wax eloquent about spirit myths on the Isle of Lewis but the man who wrote the play had no knowledge of these at all. 

It’s the most difficult play to get right. Looking back at the ten other Macbeths reviewed here, there are more two star ratings from me than any other play. The three best I’ve seen are Sean Bean at Milton Keynes before I started this blog in 2002. That had a castle set, sexy witches and simulated sex with Lady M. The critics hated it. We loved it. Then there was the Young Vic in 2015. Modern dress in a hall of mirrors. Poor reviews but again we loved it. Then there was the RSC 2011 which opened the rebuilt theatre. Easily the most frightening. Otherwise I’ve two starred several highly prestigious big name versions. So join the company …

An RSC version should be a statement to be quoted in theatre histories for decades. I’d rather forget this one. In its favour, it’s nowhere near as poor as Julius Caesar. Two stars? Even three? But 4 star should be the RSC’s default position. It has not been a good year on the main stage at the RSC.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

four star
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****

three star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian ***
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
The Observer ***
Yet the many ideas don’t fuse dramatically. As Macbeth, Reuben Joseph – of Hamilton – begins dogged, gets anxious, has what seems to be a seizure and ends, convincingly, in narrow determination, without ever seeming completely shaken. Valene Kane’s Lady M is disconcertingly giggly, skittishly flirtatious, slightly loopy – her speech incantatory as if she is high. Neither seem pushed by the pulse of the play.

two star
Dominic Maxwell, The Times **

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
Macbeth, Chichester 2019, John Simm as Macbeth
Macbeth, RSC 2023, Reuben Joseph as Macbeth
Macbeth, Globe 2023, Max Bennett as Macbeth
Macbeth, Donmar 2025, David Tennant as Macbeth
Macbeth RSC 2025, Sam Heughan as Macbeth.