This production marks the eighth year of Southwark Playhouse’s Shakespeare for Schools programme, and thanks to the theatre’s sponsors, pupils from Southwark and Lambeth schools can attend matinee performances free of charge.
But while offering young people such ready access to theatre can only be a good thing, Andy Brereton’s heavily abridged version of Macbeth is unlikely to do much for the Bard’s playground popularity. It lacks any real flavour of danger or the uncanny, failing to weave the disturbing spell that should draw the audience into its bloody maelstrom.
The tone is set by Three Witches, who are decidedly too wholesome to set the flesh creeping. Two of them, fresh-faced young women, are armed with an accordion and a clarinet on which they produce a vaguely eerie soundscape; their third, male, accomplice carries a bucket, the unromantic vessel in which the trio mix their magic potion. Despite the bottles of blood dangling from the ceiling, there’s never anything remotely chilling about these supernatural scenes.
The central performances, too, disappoint. Christopher Bowen as Macbeth and Sarah Groarke as his wife are too much the polite suburban couple, with neither conveying any sense of consuming ambition. Groarke could increase her intensity and physical presence by employing more stillness; while the vocal delivery of the overly avuncular Bowen is uneven. Significant lines are thrown away, yet he makes an incidental one, such as the instruction to a servant “Get thee to bed”, so meaningful that it almost sounds like a proposition. All in all, he and Groarke make a less than compelling pairing.
The production moves at a considerable lick, thanks to the efficiency of its cast of seven — all of whom, except for Groarke and Bowen, double up — and to Brereton’s cuts. But brevity has its price, and in the case of one excision that price is too high.
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The scene in which Macduff’s child is slaughtered before his wife’s eyes has been removed, so that we never witness the shocking height of Macbeth’s paranoid savagery, or glimpse the atrocity that motivates Macduff to kill him. The decision robs the drama of a pivotal moment — and it’s emblematic of a production that never succeeds in tapping into the play’s dark power.
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