Full of Sound and Fury

My sweetheart and I are both big fans of live theatre. We have attended less than we used to in recent years in no small part because we share an aversion to being lectured from the stage. However, last year, on the recommendation of a friend, we got tickets to a play at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival called Salesman in China. That play was based on the fact that in 1983, playwright Arthur Miller made history by travelling to China to direct a production of his classic play Death of a Salesman, being staged by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre.

It was very, very good. This year Stratford is doing a version of Macbeth, and we had seen a staging of Coriolanus some years back by the same director that we liked very much, so we got tickets for a performance last Sunday.

Chatting at the intermission and after, we agreed; disappointing. Not awful, but definitely disappointing. The director chose to set his Macbeth during the biker wars of the 1990s, so Macbeth being Thane of Glamis means he is an important dude in the gang of (King) Duncan. Now I have no issue at all with re-setting Shakespeare’s plays in different eras or places. Part of the magic of Will is that his themes are universal and timeless. I can easily see that the key motif behind The Tragedy of Macbeth – the price to be paid for an overweening desire for power – can arise in a biker gang as well as in Scotland. I recall a movie made by Kenneth Branagh some years back of Hamlet that was set in the late 18^th century, with many of the principals often dressed in WWI-era military garb. I thought that was an excellent film of one of Shakespeare’s plays.

Our problem with this staging of biker-Macbeth was that it to a great extent abandoned what I think is magical about live theatre.

(If you think you might go see this play, stop reading, spoilers are coming….)

The opening scene is completely made up, a couple of guys rowing a boat out into the water, then throwing a hooded figure overboard, after attaching a concrete block to him with a chain. This leads to a visual effect that looks like you are seeing the body weighted down under the water, at which point LOUD thunderous music is played while the credits for the play are flashed on a black curtain. That’s movie stuff, it is what you get at the start of a James Bond or Marvel film. I don’t need that to get me excited about Macbeth. The credits are in the program, man.

A blurb from a review of the play in the Globe and Mail says “Recreates the expansive magic of film”. Yea, that seems to clearly have been the goal of this staging, and who needs it? Live theatre is magic, in a way that film can never be.

The main set is a cheap motel, which serves as the home base of Macbeth and his evil Lady. Suitable enough for a biker gang, I imagine, but the ponderous moving around the stage of the large pieces of that set, so as to allow the audience to see what was happening in the various rooms of the motel, was off-putting. It spoiled the flow of the play, in my opinion.

None of this is to say the performances were not in many cases first-rate, despite the drag put on the production by this choice of staging. Tom McCamus as Macbeth was very good. He’s a long-time veteran of Stratford, and what he and his fellow actors do that I find so amazing is to bring off Shakespeare’s rhythmic, Elizabethan English as…..conversation.

Of course it is conversation, and meant to be so. Will was after all a playwright, but when I read one of his plays on a page, it is all I can do to suss out what is being said. These actors just let you see two fellows dressed in biker leathers having a chat about a mate of theirs. It’s magic, pure and simple.

And, the best moment in the play, the most memorable bit of acting, goes to Tom Rooney, another Stratford vet, playing MacDuff. There is a scene after the murder of Duncan and Banquo, after Macbeth’s gang are running amok and killing widely, where MacDuff is brought the news that his entire family has been killed. His ‘wife and babes’, as the text has it. Rooney’s portrayal of his character’s grief is stunning. He doesn’t chew up the stage, or scream, he portrays a man so cut asunder that he can barely stand. He keeps trying to get up, asking again and again…’but all of them?’ …. ‘surely not’ until he can only kneel and look at the floor, broken by grief.

That is what I go to Stratford for, to see that talent, that ability to make you feel the rage and grief of a man who has lost all that he loves. It was riveting, worth the not-inconsiderable admission price.

Lady Macbeth is played by the veteran Lucy Peacock, and our joint reaction to her portrayal was that we were looking to see Katey Sagal. I think Ms. Sagal would make a formidable Lady Macbeth, in fact. (If you’ve seen the TV series Sons of Anarchy you will get the reference, otherwise, don’t worry about it.)

But the movie effects kept coming. The climactic battle scene, in which is fulfilled the witches’ prophecy that ‘Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane’ has the bikers sticking bush branches on the front of their Harleys. Really? I’m all in for theatrical suspension of disbelief, but. Soldiers on foot employing flora as camouflage as they approach a besieged castle? Sure. Bikers sticking tree branches on the front of their Harleys as they ride up to a cheap motel? Sorry, no.

There is some other kind of technical wizardry in which what happens on stage is reflected on what seems to be a huge mirror behind the characters in some scenes, except that sometimes the characters in the mirror are exact mirror images and sometimes they do different things than the characters out front. I don’t know how they pull that off, but again, technical wizardry is not why I go to see live theatre.

In that climactic branches-on-Harleys battle scene the bikers appear to be multiplied in this mirror surface. Clever, again, I guess. Yawn.

I recall a scene in a play at Stratford many years ago – I don’t recall which play – in which the characters were on a ship, caught in a storm. Other than some offstage lightning and thunder effects, the whole thing was brought off by having actors in a line, seemingly tugging together on large ropes. Ropes that were in fact not there. Yet, with their body movement and their expressions, they conveyed with great conviction a group of sailors fighting for their lives in a storm. That, my friends, is the magic of theatre.

I think I get Stratford’s dilemma, however. What was the last movie you saw without cgi in it, and plenty of explosions? That is entertainment today in large part, and those tasked with keeping live theatre alive and kicking are perhaps not confident that people will come back if they don’t get some razzle-dazzle to tell their friends about.

They are very possibly correct in believing that, sad as I find it. The performance we attended got a standing ovation, which these days means nothing, really – can’t recall the last show of any kind that I attended that did not get one of those. Still, from what we could tell, most of the audience seemed rather more pleased than we were by the performance.