In the NAC’s latest, the audience is sucked into Macbeth and his lady’s tragic fall
The set of the NAC’s new production of Macbeth is elegantly sparse. In the opening scenes we’re faced with 10 inviting chairs, all set in a perfect line with each other, spaced evenly, divided into equal groups and placed under solid rectangles of light. The natural and divine world is in order. But soldiers violently and suddenly overturn select chairs and nature starts to spiral further out of alignment as chairs appear in more haphazard and scattered places. When one is kicked off the stage into the audience, the unnatural chaos cast over the play now erupts into our own world.
However, as with everything else to come in this latest version of the Shakespeare classic set during World War II, a simple symbol is made complex by director Peter Hinton’s meticulous attention to detail, especially on the set. This is only the first foreshadowing of the tragedy about to beset Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as they knowingly lust for power and descend into evil. Another example occurs following Duncan’s (John Koensgen) murder, when a bloodstained bed hulks in the centre of the stage. It has become an altar to death, where the wellspring of divinity and harmony in the world has been violently breached. Macbeth’s new state tries to assert order, but it is forced and unnatural: Instead of us, the chairs now face the bed, inviting death and destruction. As Macbeth says, “Blood will have blood,” and we know a state founded on the blood of the rightful ruler can come to no end but doom.
Hinton marvellously counterpoints these scenes with a terror relevant to our days. Macduff (Blair Williams) is told that his “castle is stormed,” but his wife and child are murdered in a living room – her in a 1940s housewife frock, seated on a worn flower-patterned armchair. The murderers burst in on them with a horrifying suddenness, and instead of the calculated volume of warfare, this domestic massacre is intimately jarring: Brutally loud shots and a soul-wrenching scream set this as the pinnacle of tyranny.
And later comes an even more potent reinforcement of intimacy. The set is a great wall of repeating panes of glass, discoloured and grimed with age and dirt. When the power fails, and a candle is lit for Macbeth, the wall is transformed. Suddenly the whole theatre seems to implode. The wall of translucent glass, once so powerfully lit with slashing lights, becomes opaque and small in the guttering flame, and Macbeth and the audience are limned in the same radiance. It’s effective: The intense feeling of dramatic sympathy smashes right through the audience as the stage dissolves and the room is suspended between worlds.
The quality of the acting in the NAC’s production is equally elegant, and a strong supporting cast of players blends seamlessly with the magnificent leads. Benedict Campbell as Macbeth is a powerful and disciplined speaker – from him you can really feel the music of the Shakespearean metre – while Diane D’Aquila’s performance is freer but no less riveting. Far from the plastic evil we’ve come to expect, these Macbeths are passionate about each other. They leave the stage holding hands, they constantly plead with each other to recover the love they used to have. They are desperate and doomed and sublime in need and love: an aged Romeo and Juliet, driven mad not solely by their guilt, but by the splintering of their marriage.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Jan 17, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=13836
