Desperate to break a string of costly creative and financial failures on the National’s cavernous Olivier stage - and, not for nothing, to prove that he could direct Shakespeare in the Olivier just as well as his predecessor Nicholas Hytner, famous for the intelligence, insight, and conceptual coherence of his classical work - Artistic Director Rufus Norris settled on what must have sounded at the time like pretty much a slam-dunk: an epic, Game-of-Thrones sized story that could fill the opera-sized space, a high-recognition title to guarantee advance sales and attract school groups, and a name star with a proven track record in Shakespeare, who not insignificantly also happened to be Hytner’s longtime collaborator and muse.
So what the hell happened here?
Well, leaving aside the questionable wisdom of choosing for only the second Shakespeare play of your career (the first was 25 years ago) the most notoriously bad-luck text in the canon and one of the most difficult to wrangle because of the way the linear narrative starts to break down and fragment in the final two acts - I often feel that Will was actually exploring an experimental form with this play in which the structure is a reflection of the protagonist’s psyche...leaving that to one side, you really need to have an actual idea about what you want to do with the text and what you want to say with and/or about it, and Norris seems to have left that bit out of his planning.
Instead he went to the Big Box of Concepts in the corner of his office and pulled out the direst, weariest of them all: Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia with all the trimmings, mismatched camo gear, combat boots, cardboard breast plates strapped on with duct tape, and a weird prevelance of plastic carrier bags that drift through the action like tumbleweed, suggestive of some global environmental disaster. A huge stalactite swath of black plastic bin liners swoops down oppressively from the flies, while a giant gangway like an unspooled tank tread arcs vertiginously up from the front of the stage nearly to the height of the grid.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes, but where the production gets into trouble is that it doesn’t go anywhere else. If you establish at the play’s outset a world that’s already been stripped of every kind of social order - religious, political, aristocratic - and the only thing available to be gained is what people can scrape off the floor, why is anyone in the play driven to do what they do? (The king’s hall, when the Macbeths finally attain it, is a cement bunker only slightly larger than their previous “‘pleasant seat” in, apparently, an abandoned gun emplacement, where their supporters dine off of scavenged army-surplus plates while the Lady drags around in grimy showgirl’s sequins.) What kind of order, however twisted, seeps into that void to take the place of what’s been destroyed? And the answer to that question can’t be NOTHING, or you have the mess you see before you, with virtually no motivation, conflict, or stakes left in the text for the actors andn their audience to lock onto. One would think, for example, that this would be an ideal landscape for Witches to emerge as figures of real power, but Norris’ inexplicable editing - the idea seems to be “if I can’t make sense of it, it’s out” - cuts nearly all their dialogue that isn’t crucial to plot development (no eye of newt, no “something wicked this way comes”) and reduces them to mere plot mechanics, robbing them of any agency or authority in the world of the play generally and for Macbeth specifically.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes, but where the production gets into trouble is that it doesn’t go anywhere else. If you establish at the play’s outset a world that’s already been stripped of every kind of social order - religious, political, aristocratic - and the only thing available to be gained is what people can scrape off the floor, why is anyone in the play driven to do what they do? (The king’s hall, when the Macbeths finally attain it, is a cement bunker only slightly larger than their previous “‘pleasant seat” in, apparently, an abandoned gun emplacement, where their supporters dine off of scavenged army-surplus plates while the Lady drags around in grimy showgirl’s sequins.) What kind of order, however twisted, seeps into that void to take the place of what’s been destroyed? And the answer to that question can’t be NOTHING, or you have the mess you see before you, with virtually no motivation, conflict, or stakes left in the text for the actors andn their audience to lock onto. One would think, for example, that this would be an ideal landscape for Witches to emerge as figures of real power, but Norris’ inexplicable editing - the idea seems to be “if I can’t make sense of it, it’s out” - cuts nearly all their dialogue that isn’t crucial to plot development (no eye of newt, no “something wicked this way comes”) and reduces them to mere plot mechanics, robbing them of any agency or authority in the world of the play generally and for Macbeth specifically.
Dwarfed by the gargantuan set and hamstrung by Norris’ directorial choices, the actors scrabble around in the shadows of the stygian lighting like rats on a trash heap, looking frantically for something they can play other than “Please let me finish my speech without sliding down this fucking ramp into the first row.” Parth Thakerar’s Malcolm manages to emerge from the scrum with some integrity, despite having most of his lines cut - including almost the whole of the “testing” scene- and delivering his final speech while holding Macbeth’s head in a plastic carrier bag, as if he’d stopped off at Sainsbury’s en route to the battle. Patrick Kane, on the other hand, appears to be giving some kind of demonstration on 19th century acting technique, charging down to the footlights and shouting his lines straight at the audience at the top of his lungs. As Banquo, Kevin Harvey achieves a kind of good-hearted solidity while alive, but as a ghost he’s been directed to stagger through the remainder of the evening’s action at random intervals like someone’s drunk uncle at Thanksgiving - again, where is the authority and threat of, in this case, an unquiet ghost come to confront his murderer? Anne-Marie Duff as Lady M comes off perhaps best of the bunch, a feral, flickering presence with eldritch-pale skin and enormous sunken eyes whose tragedy is to misjudge at a critical moment the character of the man she genuinely loves, and then to watch him fall to pieces in slow motion as a result, unable to do anything about it. It’s an interesting choice, which the text supports, and it keeps her from falling into the “demon//villain” posture that’s the trap of this role.
As for Rory Kinnear - my heart went out to him, there’s nothing worse than knowing you’re stuck in a terrible production and that you’re not giving the performance you know you had it in you to give. He and Duff gave the greatest impromptu “audition” I’ve ever seen for the Macbeths in a bone-chilling 7-minute excerpt as part of the RSC’s anniversary celebration a year or so ago, and it’s painful to see how badly Norris has squandered what they might have brought to the table. As always, Kinnear speaks the verse with wonderful clarity, ease, and intelligence, but he’s never really believable as the great warrior we’re told he is (not helped at all by the appallingly bad fight choreography). He’s more comfortable with the philosophical, self-doubting side of the character, and his collapse into a trembling, twitching wreck after the murder is at least compelling, if not as subtle or powerful as the interpretation he brought to the same moment in the RSC programme, a man suddenly so estranged from his idea of himself that he’s on the verge of a psychotic break, his whole body pulling back and away from his outstretched bloody hands as if to detach itself from them at the very joints. Find the video and watch it if you can for a rear-view glimpse of what might have been. And if you see Rory at the pub, buy him a drink. By the curtain call, staring into five more weeks of hell, he looked like he could use one.
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