Macbeth, Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ is a short, sharp tragedy all about the dark side of ambition. While the murder and manipulation is lacquered in a menacing, supernatural sheen. It's the internal battle of conscience vs ego that takes no prisoners and ultimately, leaves no survivors.
Richard Twyman’s adaptation for ETT, which tours the Playhouse this week, brings a distinctive new flavour to the proceedings - immediately, by cutting the first four(!) scenes. The key lines in these are pasted into later scenes throughout. The contemporary setting here and canny, creative use of technology (more on that in a minute) feel precedent and loyal compared to the ways the script has been sliced and diced. For better and worse, the result feels like erasure poetry. Twyman has lifted new shapes and meanings out of pre-existing material, but getting across his message often results in forced and unsatisfying grammar.
A great deal of the play, for example, now occurs in the titular couple’s flat. While the intention, stated in the programme, is to underpin the domestic and psychological side of the story, and I would suppose create claustrophobia, in actuality, the effect is numbing. The stagnant environment means the dialogue often loses pace, and this, combined with the changes in the script, making the story harder to follow. When the intention is to create something visceral and emotional, this is a big problem.
That said, Mike Noble’s soft-spoken Macbeth and Laura Elsworth's sharp Lady have phenomenal chemistry, which is a pleasure to watch and lifts the production. Here, the Macbeths have less of a descent into madness and villainy and more of an inevitable peeling back of the paint over it. Elsworth’s Lady Macbeth is played here with a lemony acidity, bright and stinging. Initially warm on the surface, you can feel a spite underneath her passion. Macbeth, on the other hand, is softer beneath the surface and as the stakes heighten has the ferocity of a scorpion fighting back, fear driving his anger. He seems woefully outmatched by his wife from the start, and there’s an almost pre-emptive guilt about him. With this pair, their up-till-this-point wholesomeness seems like a wobbling mirage.
The play is somewhat awkwardly split into thirds - the second of which itself is split over the intermission. The final third, as things descended into a surreal darkness, had the least grip on me.
The acting is good across the board(s), but particular praise should go to Guy Rhys as a weathered, magnetic Macduff and Leo Wan’s comic lightness as Ross.
Appearing darkly, seriously funny at times, and then giving itself over to flamboyancy in others, the show has an odd uneven relationship to campness, which might be either its defining feature or its undoing. Objects are cartoonish symbols - a cardboard crown, a breast pump, red costume shop devil horns. The witches in this version have none of their usual lines and appear as half a dozen women in blue pinafores and blonde wigs in a taunting hallucination.
Malcolm (an excellent Hayley Konadu) sings a full karaoke version of “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccarat, a line which is then, astoundingly, reprised by Macduff in what should be one of the most devastating moments of the play. A role that is meant to be a young male fighter is played by a child actress, a girl who looks about ten years old (the actress is not credited in the programme, but takes on multiple parts and delivers her lines with ease - she should be commended) - meaning the effect of this character’s violent death at Macbeth’s hand has a bizarre feel, and subsequently, undercuts the shock of show’s final fight.
The lighting and the set, however, are both glorious. Windows appear on all sides of Macbeth’s flat, and under the pretence of one of the characters vlogging, the scenes are partially projected onto screens overhead in real-time. This lends a noir eeriness is also useful for a scene involving a certain ghost, and is generally rather thrilling. That said, there are a couple of disjointed acts of audience participation that seem to only exist to show off how impressive the show’s technical effects are, and should probably have been cut.
The sound design aired on the very quiet. I was not too far into the stalls and it was just this side of easy enough to hear. Had I been sitting further back, I may have had to strain to make out the words.
Ultimately, it's difficult to know who this show will please. I attended with two friends and my partner, my friends being ardent Shakespeare nerds (one did his Masters on the Bard) whereas my partner and me only loosely acquainted with his work. For the former group, they took umbrage at the wild changes Twyman has made to the script, for the latter, we struggled to follow along in its new shape. That said, it’s a striking collage of ideas and there are some highly effective moments among them. It may not succeed in moving you, but one way or another, you will be entertained.