THIS is the third Macbeth to have come to shiver London’s timbers since the start of 2005 and, though far from bad, the least satisfying.
The Out of Joint version at Wilton’s Music Hall, which transposed Scotland to Idi Amin’s Africa, was imaginative and exciting. John Caird’s revival at the Almeida, with Simon Russell Beale gradually transformed into a medieval Stalin, had that stealthy, inner quality the play needs. Dominic Cooke’s production for the RSC, seen at Stratford last March, neither fizzes too brightly nor delves too deep.
Indeed, I sometimes wondered if some of the cast didn’t think they had been hired to perform Verdi, not Shakespeare. Louis Hilyer’s Banquo is a refreshingly rough, tough warrior at first, but before long he is booming sonorously away like Pavarotti. Pal Aron’s odd, raggety Malcolm — shouldn’t he be thrown out of the English court for vagrancy, neuroticism or both? — sounds as if he might burst into the blues at any moment. And Greg Hicks’s melodious Macbeth in his light-opera, Ruritanian uniforms . . .
Now, Hicks is a hugely gifted actor, and among his gifts is a fine and at times over-fine speaking voice. Unlike many in this sloppy age, he is superb at consonants. The problem is vowels, which are apt melodically to throb, even to echo. But I didn’t feel, as I did when Ian McKellen took the role, that the heart was painfully throbbing or its chambers desperately echoing. His is an upstanding, articulate Macbeth who signals blank dismay at the murder he half-willingly commits and looks all sweaty and devastated as he sardonically trudges towards his denouement. But his dark, visceral parts aren’t involved in the equation.
Sian Thomas fares better as a Lady Macbeth who is, as she should be, superficially tough but shattered by her growing isolation and her man’s escalating ruthlessness.
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Helped by her mad hair and thin, pinched face, which goes sepia in candlelight, she has a genuinely unnerving sleepwalking scene. Yet someone laughed when she launched into a high, creaky wail of distress. Not her fault, I thought, but that of a production which hadn’t generated enough tension or sense of evil.
Blame the theatre, if you like. The Albery, like the RST in Stratford, isn’t intimate enough to leave you feeling you’ve been supping with horrors. Or blame witches who look like unemployed washerwomen and, for all their jabbering, gulping and fiddling with ropes and nooses, never make the flesh creep. Or a cast which — and here let’s except Richard Cordery’s strong Duncan and, especially, Clive Wood’s troubled and finally distraught Macduff — thinks it’s performing at Covent Garden.
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