I didn't think I would have an easy time getting tickets to see the Patrick Stewart Macbeth, directed by Rupert Goold, which is currently playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 22nd and - happily - will be moving on to Broadway in late March for an eight-week run. When I made my dutiful daily call to the box office last Wednesday to see if any returns had come in, I was so startled to be offered a seat that I actually argued with them briefly before it sank in:
"We have tickets for Friday."
"But you're supposed to be sold out!"
"Yes, we're sold out, but we have tickets for Friday."
"I thought you were sold out!"
"Look, do you want a ticket or not?"
BAM seems to have a non-standard definition of "sold out". It's a little tricky getting all the way to Brooklyn from New Haven on a Friday afternoon, but I wasn't going to turn this down. It definitely beat the previous plan of going in at the crack of dawn Saturday morning and spending several hours sitting on the sidewalk hoping for a return.
I've seen the Scottish play many, many times over the years, and as is my practice with Shakespeare's plays, was seeing it over and over in the hopes of finally finding a production which would stick in my heart and memory and be my definitive Macbeth forever. This production wasn't perfect, but I think I may have found what I was looking for. I have that warm, satisfied feeling that I need to never see Macbeth again, though of course I probably will eventually. And I'm seriously considering going back to this one again when it moves to Broadway.
Left: Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Yes, his right hand is exactly where you think it is.
Given the time remaining in the run and the Broadway transfer coming up, I heartily recommend this production to everyone within range of New York City and with a taste for high-powered Shakespeare. The remainder of this post contains significant production spoilers, and I recommend coming back and reading it later if you plan to see this production - it deserves to be taken in without any foreknowledge.
Update 4/13/08: An interesting interview with director Rupert Goold and star Kate Fleetwood, spoiler-free.
Right: diabolical nurses with wounded solider in the opening scene.
First, let me say: this is the most intense and horrific opening of this play I have ever seen. They keep you right off balance by skipping the opening scene with the witches and going straight into Scene 2, with the necessary setup information being provided by a gravely wounded soldier in a set that looks remarkably like a morgue (I half expected to see McKellen as Richard III pop up to do the scene with Lady Anne), as nurses try frantically to save his life. In the background, an EKG is projected on both a small medical monitor and the walls of the set.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
Beeeeeeeeeep.
The monitor line goes flat with that familiar beep that indicates the patient has just flatlined, and the three nurses, having just killed the soldier, turn to the audience to give the opening incantation ("When shall we three meet again...") previously skipped, revealing themselves as some of the creepiest witches I've ever seen. What a visceral nightmare: your nurses are murdering you. I was on the edge of my seat from that point forward.
I can't describe every exciting moment, but let me mention a few memorable elements:
The set never changed, though it shifted from being a hospital/morgue to a dining room to the Macbeths' kitchen to a train. An old-style elevator with the manual gates was upstage right, and with the help of some dry ice it gave the impression, Angel Heart-like, of being an elevator straight to hell. A fridge upstage left rarely seemed to contain much food, though it was used effectively for Macbeth's midnight snacking, but the general atmosphere of horror was such that every time it was opened I expected to see a body or something.
The costumes and the periodic video projections of rallies that could have been bits of a Leni Riefenstahl film, giving the general impression of 1930s-40s fascism without being place- or period-specific. This was reminiscent of the McKellen Richard III, as staged at BAM back in 1992 and badly overdone in the film version.
The witch-nurses were used to excellent effect, though unfortunately their most famous scene ("Double, double, toil and trouble...") was marred by being played in rap and with such loud music that some of the words were lost in the noise. Since I can practically recite the scene from memory this didn't bother me as much as it should have, and I rather enjoyed the cavorting. (And having costumed an adaptation of Lysistrata that included a rap number, I'm in no position to criticize its use as a device anyway!)
Patrick Stewart himself, holding the center of the play, alternately ambitious and ambivalent, honest soldier turned desperate and despotic, alternating between pure evil and despair until his final scene is as much suicide as defeat.
The much younger Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth, take-charge trophy wife and harried hostess dealing with Lady Macduff and the Macduff children showing up as inconvenient houseguests. Trying to psyche up Macbeth for murder while fetching the dessert course, she was so visibly exasperated with her husband's dithering she looked ready to heave the (large) cake in his face as they talked.
Fleetwood and Stewart in the clinch pictured above, as Macbeth is seriously turned on by her "I have given suck" speech. Horrifying and effective and hot; I thought he was going to lift her up on the kitchen table to get on with the whole bringing forth of men-children right then and there.
Christopher Patrick Nolan as the porter was a perfect little psychopath. He pissed in the sink! And the knocking sounded like someone was knocking at the gates of hell, booming through the entire theater.
Macduff, the excellent Michael Feast, with pitch-perfect denial and grief: "All my pretty ones?"
The murder of Banquo, done by Macbeth's secret agents on board a brilliantly simulated train. Quiet murder in the midst of a crowd; it was like something out of a cold war thriller. And I would never have thought the combination of video projection and sound effects with two rows of people on chairs swaying in unison could create such a wonderful illusion of a moving train car. Theatercraft at its best.
Ross (Tim Treloar) played and costumed as a harried and oblivious bureaucrat with rimmed glasses and a briefcase, all ready to handle any necessary paperwork or suggest a bit of spin. It was a wonderful way to single out one of the otherwise hard-to-individuate mass of warrior thanes.
Ross, suddenly less oblivious, being tortured for information about Malcolm and Macduff. Atextual, but effective.
The apparitions that give Macbeth his final three prophecies. The set is a morgue again, with three corpses in body bags and the witches standing beside them. For each prophecy, one of the corpses comes to life and contorts wildly inside the body bag, never visible as he groans out the prophecy. This entire production gave me horror-movie cold chills, and this scene fit right in with the general theme of the dead not staying dead in Macbeth's mind.
Finally, on a lighter note, one doesn't expect a dancing scene in the Scottish play, but I was thrilled that they staged a bit of impromptu dancing as a display of frenetic gaiety at the end of Macbeth's notorious Banquo-haunted dinner party. I note that the three couples involved showed considerably more ability in the galop than the chorus in the recent Yale Opera production of Die Fledermaus.
For other takes on this production, there are reviews here (by Duncan Pflaster) and here (Ben Brantley in the New York Times). In my opinion, both give away too much production detail, but if you've read all the way to the end of my post you obviously aren't too worried.
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