Anal rape, blowjobs, fright wigs, bare bums, cocaine snorting, pill popping, vodka swilling and witches miming to 'I will survive'. This production of Macbeth had everything schoolchildren like, and I spotted at least one class at the matinee on Tuesday who were giving it more attention than an afternoon of double maths.
The only person who may not have been happy was William Shakespeare, rotating gently in his grave in Stratford. As a matter of fact, I believe Shakespeare's plays are infinitely flexible and there are no rules about what you can do to them (Chekhov is another matter). The only question is, does it work? A few years ago I saw an incredibly exciting Macbeth directed by Max Stafford-Clark at Wilton's Music Hall, set in Africa and staged as a promenade, with Kalashnikov-toting bush fighters in fright wigs and a terrifying appearance of Banquo's ghost. It worked.
This Polish production at the Globe works only in parts. It is highly physical, with some really convincing performances, particularly from Michal Majnicz as Macbeth and Judyta Paradzinska as Lady Macbeth, whose way of screwing her husband's courage to the sticking place is to put him on the floor and kick him into submission. But, as so often with director-led theatre from Eastern Europe, endless improvisation leads to the original text being truncated and diminished. The last part of Macbeth's trajectory is excised completely, and the play ends abruptly shortly after Lady Macbeth takes an overdose. A bunch of figures in camouflage run in and smother Macbeth, and ... that's it, folks.
Macduff is almost written out, though his wife is brutally raped face down on the stage before being murdered. There are other additions, such as Lady Macbeth becoming pregnant. Some of director Maja Kleczewska's ideas make a lot of sense, such as the edgy and violent rivalry between Macbeth and Banquo. There are some haunting and powerful images -- Lady Macduff's two daughters run around the stage firing soap bubbles at each other before they are done to death.
The action is set in a macabre gangsterland, a depraved moral wasteland of hoods and harlots, with no redeeming features. Before the play opens, witches pass among the groundlings, dressed as visions from some kind of sexual nightmare. Macbeth and Banquo are slumped in cheap armchairs, bandaged after a fight, looking at their mobile phones. It feels like a sleazy hotel lobby in a downmarket East European town. Vodka comes straight from the bottle, and Duncan's arrival at the Macbeths turns into a no-holds-barred party in which Duncan, a mafia boss, strips off and does a lewd dance. With the exception of Macduff, neatly dressed in a black moleskin suit, the characters are dressed as vulgarly and cheaply as possible, with lots of clunky gold neckchains. The all-out partying on the eve of Duncan's murder, with almost everyone the worse for wear, is a good idea. But there's a curiously dated in-your-face style to this production, which ends up losing many of Shakespeare's themes and overplaying others into over-the-topski caricature.
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