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Macbeth
By Lizzie Loveridge
The Scottish play is problematic and of the dozen or so productions I have seen of Macbeth only a few satisfied fully. Here from the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by the man who is tipped to be the next incumbent of the RSC head chair, Gregory Doran, is a darkly innovative, sensory and excitingly staged, Macbeth.
The auditorium at the Young Vic, one of London's reliable studio venues, is flooded with overly bright spotlights as the audience trudge in. This is so that when the play commences in absolute darkness, we can see nothing of the three weird sisters, only hear their strange cries. Our hearing too is overexposed, deafened by the crashing of thunder in the most dramatic opening of the play. So we are sensorily disorientated. Macbeth (Antony Sher) and Banquo (Ken Bones) are carried in, shoulder high, sweating, their faces blackened from the fire of battle. Above the stage two Japanese Taiko drummers set a frenetic pace and soldiers rush about underlining this production's vibrant physicality.
At two hours ten minutes without a break this is one of the shortest ever adaptations of Macbeth. The length gives the play considerable intensity as any scene which drags, has been expunged. The downside of this is that there is little time to establish Macbeth's character as a noble and honourable soldier before he becomes the victim of his own ambition. Sher's Macbeth barely pauses to consider what he should do before murdering Duncan. Even as he prostrates himself before the king, who is a guest in his house, his intention is evil. An old white haired man, tall, clad in medieval robes like an archbishop, with a movingly sonorous voice, Duncan (Trevor Martin), is saintly. Sher, on the other hand struts, stocky in modern military battledress, or square shouldered tuxedo, full of sinister intent. Sher's speed of decision also gives Lady Macbeth (tall and stately Harriet Walter) a less prominently nasty role.
Doran's staging is outstanding. Banquo's murder again takes place in darkness lit only by torches, one flash giving us the briefest glimpse, a single frightening image of a man being stabbed. In the banquet scene, the ghosts are Sher's own demons as he stares into space. Later we see the form of eerie faces pushing through a vinyl sheet, like partially shaped sculptures. The banquet scene segues into the heath as the three weird sisters spring onstage, up turning the table hanging off the cross bars and squirming in a dance of pelvic thrusts.
Stephen Brimson Lewis's set has a dramatic drawbridge which descends from a rear wall of old and broken stone which allows a memorable entrance for Lady Macbeth. There is a parapet, like a balcony, at either side a metal spiral staircase and high overhead, a crumpled canopy of steel grey gauze masks the machinery.
The night I saw Macbeth, many of the audience were schooldchildren, for whom Macbeth is routinely the first introduction to Shakespeare's plays. This rapid, physical production had them silenced and attentive. They will remember the thunderous staging but one can't help wondering if they had time to assimilate any of Shakespeare's beautiful verse.
MACBETH
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Gregory Doran
Starring: Antony Sher, Harriet Walter
With: Diane Beck, Noma Dumezweni, Polly Kemp, Trevor Martin, John Dougall, Robert Whitelock, Ken Bones, Christopher Olivares-Chandler, Edward Brown, Nigel Cooke, Diane Beck, Alistair Strong, Ben Inigo-Jones, Paul Webster, Guy Moore, Richard Armitage, John Killoran, Stephen Noonan, Glenn Chapman, John Kane, Jeff Alexander, Polly Kemp,
Set Design: Stephen Brimson-Lewis
Lighting Design: Tim Mitchell
Sound Design: John A Leonard for Aura
Music composed and directed by Adrian Lee
Movement: Sn Williams
Fights: Terry King
Running time: Two hours ten minutes with no interval
Box Office: 020 7928 6363
A Royal Shakespeare Company Production at the Young Vic, The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 To 3rd June 2000. Sold out but 12 day tickets are available every day, released at noon, queuing starts at 10 am. Also try ticket agencies.
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 5th May 2000 performance
http://www.curtainup.com/macbethlond.htmlZitat:
THEATER; A Season of Sound and Fury, Signifying Plenty
By MATT WOLFJUNE 18, 2000
ANTONY SHER is the first to acknowledge that the majority of ''Macbeth'' productions don't work, almost as if the supernatural component to Shakespeare's play were casting a hex on it in performance. Added to that was his first exposure to the text, as a schoolboy in his native South Africa, where, the actor said, ''It was taught appallingly, so I had no real experience of it.''
It is easy, then, to imagine the mixture of excitement and trepidation with which Mr. Sher and his director, Gregory Doran, approached the play when they chose to revive it for the Royal Shakespeare Company in November. The production went on to be praised as the company's best in decades -- that is to say, since Judi Dench and Ian McKellen played Shakespeare's murderous couple for the director Trevor Nunn in 1976.
The current staging ended a sellout London run on June 3 and has transferred intact to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, where it is being presented through next Sunday as part of that city's annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
''Macbeth'' devotees may rightly feel sated at the moment. The Royal Shakespeare version is arriving hot on the heels of a Broadway staging that stars Kelsey Grammer and is directed by Terry Hands, who coincidentally happens to be both a longtime colleague of Mr. Sher's and a former artistic director of the R.S.C. Mr. Grammer opened in the play on Thursday at the Music Box Theater, with Diane Venora as Lady Macbeth. (For ultra-fans of the play, the Gorilla Repertory Theater Company has revived its version, which winds up a series of free performances outdoors at Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan on Thursday night and Saturday night.)
Broadway sees relatively few productions of ''Macbeth,'' even if Mr. Grammer did previously inherit the role for six weeks in 1980 at Lincoln Center. That was before the actor's work in the television hits ''Cheers'' and ''Frasier,'' when, not long out of the Juilliard School, he was cast as Lennox and then stepped in for the leading actor, Philip Anglim, in a production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater directed by Sarah Caldwell.
In London, on the other hand, and in Europe, where the classics are regularly produced, ''Macbeth'' appears often enough for Mr. Hands to estimate that he has seen the play some 40 times.
The present Royal Shakespeare production raised expectations in England because it marked Mr. Sher's first foray into Shakespeare's so-called big four (''Hamlet,'' ''Lear'' and ''Othello'' complete the quartet). Mr. Sher has been admired over time as Richard III and Leontes, among other Shakespearean roles that include Lear's Fool, but never as one of the playwright's tragic heroes.
''It was a hangover from being this little white Jewish South African,'' Mr. Sher said recently. ''For a long time, I wasn't sure whether classical establishment British theater was an area I was allowed to go into; I'd always had a slight sense of being a trespasser.''
Eventually, Mr. Sher recalled, he acquired the courage to tackle the role, emboldened by a celebrated Zulu ''Macbeth'' in Johannesburg in 1995 -- a staging, he said, that ''worked so superbly.'' (The show, ''Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth,'' was seen in New York at the 1997 Lincoln Center Festival.) Mr. Sher also returned to the script. ''I reread the play,'' he said, ''and was astonished to find that it reads magnificently. You sense Shakespeare sitting up through several days and nights with this thing pouring out of him.''
Both Mr. Sher, 50, and his director, Mr. Doran, 40, spoke in separate conversations of having ''an appointment'' with the play. The two share a house in North London, and have been partners for 13 years.
''By the time we came to do 'Macbeth,' '' Mr. Sher said, ''we needed to do it, and we needed to do it in a certain way.'' But during the seven weeks of rehearsal, the staging actually evolved away from the Jacobean setting first envisioned and toward something more abstract and placeless.''
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''We were trying to distill the play down to an essence,'' said Mr. Doran, a former actor who has previously directed Mr. Sher in ''Titus Andronicus,'' ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' and ''The Winter's Tale.'' This stripping away of ''Macbeth'' meant divesting the play of all extraneous pomp (and, a risk with this play, camp) so that its restless, infernal heart could be laid bare. The three witches, for example, first emerge out of total darkness and later usurp the banquet scene -- startlingly so.
WE don't believe in witches anymore,'' Mr. Doran said, ''but we do believe in fear. What we did with 'Macbeth' was to begin not from the supernatural but from a much more primal basis.''
The result somehow creates the feeling of a new play, said Harriet Walter, whose Lady Macbeth has earned her equal praise with Mr. Sher. ''The modern look of the armies,'' the actress said, ''the almost Kosovan atmosphere -- from the kick-off it becomes a kind of modern play, which allows the audience to follow the psychological tension, like a thriller, in a very immediate way.''
And unlike some versions of ''Macbeth,'' which seem to focus on the title role and merely sketch in the parts around him, this one, Mr. Doran said, is a genuine partnership because ''we had to get Lady Macbeth right before anything.'' Ms. Walter's willowy elegance -- her cool eerily giving way as the play's chaos ensues -- complements the bluff, squat braggadocio of Mr. Sher's warrior-Macbeth.
Adrian Noble, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare, has spoken of a possible transfer of the production to Broadway, where Mr. Sher made his debut in 1997 in the Pam Gems play ''Stanley,'' for which he received a Tony nomination.
But the simultaneous presence of the version involving Mr. Grammer and Mr. Hands now makes that unlikely. ''There certainly wouldn't be two places on Broadway for the play,'' Mr. Sher said.
For his part, Mr. Grammer, 45, said: ''I don't want to set things up for an embattled comparison. Ours is homegrown, and I'm very excited about the idea of an all-American cast. We may as well put ours out there and let people either shoot it down or applaud it.'' The production, a limited run through July 30, is being presented by the SFX Theatrical Group and Emanuel Azenberg.
'''The only similarity,'' said Mr. Hands, 59, who saw Mr. Doran's production at its final performance in Stratford (''Maybe he was just coming to pick up a few clues,'' Mr. Doran said jokingly), ''is that ours also is done without an interval.''
''Look,'' Mr. Hands added, ''I'm delighted. The more Shakespeare we have in North America the better.''
Matt Wolf is the London theater critic for Variety and a regular writer on the arts from Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/18/theater/theater-a-season-of-sound-and-fury-signifying-plenty.htmlZitat:
THEATER REVIEW; Fierce Kindred Spirits, Burning for a Throne
By BEN BRANTLEYJUNE 22, 2000
Their glittering, too-open eyes are scary, so luminous that you expect them to glow in the dark. But while the usual witches and ghosts are in attendance, it is something less supernatural that gives this power couple's gaze its intensity in the Royal Shakespeare Company's thrilling new production of ''Macbeth,'' which runs through Sunday at the Long Wharf Theater here.
Come now, you've seen the look that beams so unnervingly from the faces of Antony Sher and Harriet Walter, the show's splendid stars, and if you're a New Yorker, you encounter it daily. It's a ravenous, lusty look that even the most sycophantic smile can't camouflage. Stronger than any sex drive, it is pure, simple ambition, and these Macbeths are positively drunk on it.
Without making the obvious bids for topical relevance, the director, Gregory Doran, has shaped Shakespeare's tale of regicide and its discontents into a harrowing and disturbingly funny parable for the dawn of the 21st century. This ''Macbeth,'' which bears scant resemblance to the stodgy oratorical exercise now on Broadway under the same name, finds its taking-off point in its protagonist's declaration that he has ''only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other. . . .''
Though Macbeth famously never finishes that sentence, this adrenaline-pumping interpretation amply fills in the blank, carefully and vigorously charting the landscape where leaping ambition finally falls. That's the realm of madness of course, but I have never seen a ''Macbeth'' that makes such a specific and convincing case for its leading lord and lady's increasingly demented behavior as a natural outgrowth of their characters as we first see them.
Be careful what you wish for. Truman Capote, a devoted chronicler of people with warping appetites, spent his life accumulating evidence of the wisdom of that warning. Not that these Macbeths have any choice in the matter. Their compulsiveness and their bottomless need to reach the throne are all too evident long before King Duncan (Trevor Martin) is slain.
Take, for example, the moment when Macbeth -- freshly covered with laurels from his triumphs on the battlefield -- appears at an assembly where the king announces his successor. Mr. Sher puffs himself like a nominee on Oscar night, clearly in anticipation of hearing his own name. And the winner is, alas, the king's son, Malcolm. For a sharp second, this Macbeth appears to have had the wind knocked out of him. But then, like many an Oscar loser, he is the first to lead the applause with a hearty smile.
In like manner, when we first see Ms. Walter's Lady Macbeth, reading aloud a letter from her husband, she runs through the text with a breathless sexual urgency; when she comes to the word ''king,'' in reference to the witches' prophecies for her husband, she can't even speak it at first, she's so excited. Ooo baby, we're almost there.
Mr. Sher and Ms. Walter are much celebrated for their vital portraiture on the London stage. (Mr. Sher, the better known in the States, appeared indelibly on Broadway several seasons ago in ''Stanley.'') The intensity they bring to the murderous thane and his wife isn't surprising in itself. What is, is how they are able to begin at an improbable fever pitch and then keep growing hotter, moving imaginatively forward when you think they have reached a dead end.
The entire production, in New Haven as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, sustains a martial urgency that only rarely slackens, underscored with propulsive drum-driven music by Adrian Lee. In keeping with the suffocating nighttime imagery woven throughout the tragedy, the evening begins in utter darkness.
The chanting weird sisters (Diane Beck, Noma Dumezweni, Polly Kemp) who begin the play are at first only seen, not heard: whispering, as it were, in our ears. The first visual image is of soldiers and of a bloodied man hurled into their midst as if by a catapult. The image is apt, since the news this man bears, of Macbeth's bloody successes on the field, sets off a missile that won't self-destruct until the evening's end, and perhaps not even then.
Mr. Sher's Macbeth is introduced as a revved-up conquering hero, borne on the shoulders of his comrades, instead of making the customary entrance with no one but Banquo (Ken Bones). This Macbeth is the image of the popular soldier: rowdy, virile, collegial.
He's a brusque, blunt-spoken type, and if you asked him, he would probably tell you he is not by nature introspective. (He treats his horror-conjuring imagination as an unwanted guest.) What makes him stand out from the crowd is his energy, which burns a shade too bright for comfort.
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Ms. Walter's designing Lady is, correspondingly, a bundle of electromagnetic nerves, and it makes sense that when these two reunite, a statewide blackout follows. While some interpretations present Lady Macbeth as the prime motivator of the crimes to come, this production makes it clear that the spouses share, er, strong common interests.
Like many couples they have a seesaw relationship of support: when one's down, the other's up. That is, until the final acts, when they both come spectacularly unglued.
Mr. Doran and his team ensure that their production is not only a portrait of a marriage. Whereas I often leave a ''Macbeth'' hard pressed to remember who played whom in the supporting cast, this version offers a gallery of cleanly and specifically defined characters, not all of whom are immune to the plague of o'ervaulting ambition.
Mr. Bones's tough, shrewd Banquo, for example, clearly has his own mighty thirst for regal glory, a trait made to figure ominously in the evening's final tableau. And in that usually tedious scene in which the exiled Malcolm (John Dougall) and Macduff (a Sam Shepard-like Nigel Cooke) discuss the traits required for kingship, you get the idea that the passive, pure Malcolm doesn't really have what it takes.
Stephen Brimson Lewis's set designs and Tim Mitchell's lighting conspire to create a world in which a Grand Guignol darkness dominates and the fantasy of majesty glows with ecclesiastic mystery. Simple props are used to resonant poetic effect: a child's pacifier, military medals and, particularly, the king's crown. Notice also the use of Macduff's dagger in the climactic fight with Macbeth.
There are a few elements that feel overdone. Making the drunken porter an audience-baiting comic in the manner of the M.C. from ''Cabaret'' breaks the play's rhythm in unwelcome ways, though Stephen Noonan handles the part expertly. And Mr. Sher, whose Macbeth later assumes a gangsterish menace that recalls Bob Hoskins at his most splenetic, may be a shade too bogus in his rhetorical lamentations after the body of Duncan is discovered.
These are very small sins. In the big moments this ''Macbeth'' delivers grandly. Both the sleepwalking scene, rendered as an autistic frenzy by Ms. Walter, and the ''tomorrow and tomorrow'' monologue, to which Mr. Sher brings a simple, all-flattening nihilism, have the painful, grotesque immediacy of lanced blisters. Even more impressive, you are always aware of the chain of emotional logic that has brought these two to this jagged point.
The evening's boldest moment, both its darkest and its brightest, comes when Macbeth and his Lady, weary with the burdens of monarchy and murder, agree that all they really need is a good night's sleep. Sleep? The very word sends them into paroxysms of laughter that fleetingly confirm the couple's bond as kindred souls. Maintaining power, as any C.E.O. or magazine editor will tell you, is a full-time job. There's no rest for the supersuccessful.
MACBETH
By William Shakespeare; directed by Gregory Doran; sets by Stephen Brimson Lewis; lighting by Tim Mitchell; music composed and directed by Adrian Lee; movement by Sian Williams; fights by Terry King; sound by John A. Leonard for Aura; assistant director, Jonathan Munby; company voice work by Andrew Wade, Neil Swain and Charmian Hoare; production manager, Stuart Gibbons; costume supervisor, Stephanie Arditti; company and stage manager, Martyn Sergent; deputy stage manager, Harry Teale; assistant stage manager, Fiona H. Mott. The Royal Shakespeare Company presented by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. At the Long Wharf Theater, New Haven.
WITH: Antony Sher (Macbeth), Harriet Walter (Lady Macbeth), Nigel Cooke (Macduff), Diane Beck (Lady Macduff and Weird Sister), John Dougall (Malcolm), Jeff Alexander (Second Soldier), Richard Armitage (Angus), Ken Bones (Banquo), Glenn Chapman (Macbeth's Servant), Noma Dumezweni (Weird Sister), John Kane (Doctor and Old Man), Polly Kemp (Weird sister and Gentlewoman), John Killoran (Captain and Menteth), Trevor Martin (Duncan), Guy Moore (Lennox), Stephen Noonan (Porter, Seyton and First Soldier), , Paul Webster (Ross) and Robert Whitelock (Donalbain and Young Seyward).
Das erste Auftauchen von Richards Namen in der NYTimes.