Tour de force, or, Macbeth as Theater

On February 17, we saw the stunning Rupert Goold production of Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring Patrick Stewart. This was far better than the Macbeth we saw last fall, and had far more vision than the dreamy and reductive The Tempest with the same director and star in Stratford 18 months ago.

Many Shakespeare productions set in more recent times seem to be making a fairly simple point: the themes of the play are timeless, or the beauty of the language can overcome the lack of a costume designer. Goold sets this Macbeth in Stalinist Russia and then uses that setting to change the interpretation of many scenes while remaining true to the text. Banquo is murdered in the middle of a crowded train while the other passengers remain uninvolved. Lennox brutally interrogates Ross at the end of Act III in a stark display of violent license, and that scene utterly changes Ross’s later warnings to Lady Macduff. We see the destructive effects that living in a police state has even within a family, as Lady Macduff and her son bitterly jab at each other with lines that could have been tender and funny. The humor is torn from the corners of the play as it has evidently been torn from that world, with the night porter a foul-tempered deviant rather than a comic relief.

Reviewers make much of Macbeth’s preparing a sandwich while hiring the murderers to kill his best friend. That scene does show Macbeth’s growing sociopathy, but it also highlights the weakness of the murderers in their totalitarian world. They cower and simplistically attempt to follow their orders, plotting nothing themselves and betraying neither confidence nor king. If the murderers are weak, then how much more evil are the strong.

That kitchen scene also neatly captures the entirely interior viewpoint of the show. From kitchen to interrogation room to operating room, we see the story develop in hidden places. The banquet scene where Banquo’s ghost appears is one of the only scenes set in a public space, and Goold allows us to experience that scene from the inside by putting Macbeth’s seat at the head of the table downstage facing away from the audience, as if we are each then Macbeth watching our world crumble.

The production uses a lot of video effects, from mood-setting clips of Russian military parades to a truly creepy spreading course of blood on the walls before Banquo’s ghost appears. I finally understand what the American Repertory Theatre was trying to accomplish with integrating video into past productions from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the far side of the moon. Video often seems extremely flat when presented in the context of live theater, but almost nothing is flat in Goold’s Macbeth. The actors find daggers before them in one scene after another, and wield them wholeheartedly. The results are bloody and fascinating.