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Gilding the bloody lily
MACBETH GUILGUD THEATRE
WITH all the talk of a snap election this week, political commentators might do well to look to another Scottish ‘play’.
Critics love nothing more than to eek out modern-day political parallels in Shakespeare.
It shows how the plays continue to reinvent themselves; with relevance comes, dare I say it, timelessness.
Macbeth, about the savage cycles of power and the lust for the “top job”, is no exception.
Gordon Brown was, in the late 1990s, portrayed as a Macbeth figure waiting in the wings for Tony Blair. Newspaper cartoonists, on realising the dour Scot was incapable of acting on impulse and would never stage a bloody coup, chose Cherie Blair as their Lady Macbeth. I may be mistaken, but was there not a touch of Dave Cameron in the shiny-faced Malcolm played by Scott Handy in this production?
Director Rupert Gould explores Shakespeare’s Macbeth to its full blood-splattered potential. It is a wonderfully macabre production.
The tone is set from the outset with the tortured cries of a wound-gaping solder tied to a hospital bed. It ends with the dripping severed head of Macbeth (Patrick Stewart, pictured) held aloft by the triumphant Malcolm.
Stewart inevitably stole the show, but Kate Fleetwood, with a kind of jagged face, was an excellent piece of casting as Lady Macbeth. She won the louder whoops at curtain.
The witches, cast as ghoulish necromancers, stalked the stage, a kind of dungeon/morgue, dressed in nurses’ uniforms. They sharpened knives, filled syringes and summoned dread demons from dead bodies. I would not advise a trip to the Gielgud before any major surgery.
The action is set in Stalinist Russia. Grainy images of the dictator are beamed onto the back wall. But this was not properly seen through and the same could be said for the theme of surveillance.
Television screens flashed flickers of the events as they passed. I take from this that, in the age of CCTV, heinous murders are more likely to be caught and, perhaps, more bloody and voyeuristic too. It all felt a little laboured.
Macbeth, while contemplating his bloodied hands after the murder of the King, says: “This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine; making the green one red.” This is Shakespeare showing how ideas can be just as powerfully put in simple language. A lesson perhaps for Mr Gould, who, in my humble opinion, may be guilty of over-elaboration.
Until December 1
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