Macbeth is the play that introduced me to Shakespeare. I played Fleance, son of Banquo, in a school production 50 years ago. I can't remember very much about it, though one black and white photo of the cast has survived.
Over the last two decades I've seen some productions that have stuck in the memory. The most frightening was Max Stafford-Clark's extraordinary African Macbeth at Wilton's Music Hall, a promenade production with guerrilla fighters in bright Afro wigs poking guns at the audience, and a banquet scene where Banquo's ghost popped up through a paper cloth in the centre of the table. Antony Sher and Harriet Walter at the Swan in Stratford played the Macbeths as a power couple in the moral vacuum of the Balkan conflict. I've seen Macbeth played by Will Keen, Simon Russell Beale, Sean Bean, Jasper Britton and a number of other actors.
I've been struck by how many directors feel obliged to turn the play inside out in a quest to find something original. Sometimes the results have been bizarre. The last full-scale production at the Globe by Lucy Bailey in 2010 was an over-designed, over-conceptualised mess which used buckets of fake blood and a black net covering the groundling audience. Elliot Cowan and Laura Rogers didn't get a chance to interpret their roles, because the director wasn't interested in subtlety or ambiguity.
Tim Carroll, a much better director than Lucy Bailey, created an even stranger production at the Globe in 2001, with Macbeth (Jasper Britton) in a dinner jacket and Lady Macbeth (Eve Best) in a slinky silver evening gown. Instead of buckets of blood, there were just buckets -- tin ones -- into which stones were dropped as a substitute for the usual stage violence. As an exercise in taking a non-realistic approach to Shakespeare and pushing it to extremes, it was interesting, but ultimately sterile. Anyone who had never seen Macbeth before would have gone away mystified.
Now Eve Best, whose acting career has soared magnificently since 2001, has chosen the play for her directorial debut, with Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro as the murdering couple. Like Will Keen and Anastasia Hille in the excellent Cheek by Jowl production in 2010, they are a very plausible married couple. Spiro, with her great comic gifts, isn't perhaps the obvious choice for Lady M, but she creates a believable character for whom the murder of Duncan is a step away from her usual behaviour. Millson, who reminds me of a younger Jeremy Irons, is an introspective, self-doubting Macbeth, whose delivery of the 'brief candle' speech to the audience is beautifully judged. Both these actors speak Shakespeare's verse with exemplary clarity and force.
Best's production doesn't strain for effect and is relatively traditional, with some original touches, not all of them successful. The three witches are excellent, and there's a performance of exceptional clarity by Philip Cumbus as Malcolm, who brings alive the long and sometimes tedious England scene with Macduff in a way I have never seen before. Cumbus, who first appears with his nose in a book, is visibly startled when Duncan anoints him as his heir, and suggests he is far too fastidious for the brutal world of kingship.
Not all the casting is quite as strong, and there are some elements where it appears the director may not quite have been able to make up her mind. There's a strange melange of English and Scottish accents, and a visual gap between the set, a stark white mud-spattered palisade, and the Renaissance splendour of the period costumes. The fight scenes rely on axes rather than swords, and the final contest between Macbeth and Macduff seems to end rather limply. A bigger problem is that, either accidentally or deliberately, too many lines provoke laughter from the audience. When Bette Bourne appears as an outrageously camp porter, the scene doesn't break the tension in the way it should because the tension of the murder scene hasn't been ratcheted up enough. I have the feeling that, like many productions at the Globe, this one will build a much better relationship with the audience as the run continues.
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