Thursday 30 June 2016

Stratford Festival 2016 # 1: The Two Faces of Treachery

Okay, this time it's really a review of "the Scottish play", and no fooling.  For any non-theatrical readers, virtually all theatre folks subscribe to the sincere belief that you will curse any theatrical enterprise in which you are involved if you so much as breathe the name "Macbeth" inside the theatre, or in any meeting, rehearsal, etc., in any other venue.  Therefore, when it must be mentioned, it is called simply "the Scottish play" -- and it's best not to use even this circumlocution too frequently.

There are as many theories about the origin of this belief as there are people trying to unravel its roots.  But more than this: it is also widely believed that trying to perform the play will cast a deep shadow across the careers of actors, directors, designers, and crew -- and that it is the one play which is almost guaranteed to produce an artistic failure, even if it succeeds at the box office.

The current production at the Stratford Festival is certainly not perfect, but it has come closer to the mythical perfection in its overall tone and approach than almost any other performance of the play which I have seen.  As we've come to expect from director Antoni Cimolino, it has energy to burn, a clear sense of time and place, a clear sense of style and of language, and sparing but very effective use of special lighting and sound effects.  That energy is very important; without it, the play is apt to sink into a morass of melodrama.

The almost unavoidable problem is that Shakespeare's script sails closer to melodrama than almost any other of the Bard's plays, with the possible exception of Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus.  So the poor artists, struggle as they may, are hard-pressed to avoid tipping into melodramatic excess in certain scenes.  However, this production does minimize the melodrama while upping the quotient of genuine dramatic tension across the play as a whole.  This performance of Shakespeare's shortest tragedy lasts for just 2½ hours including the intermission, but its a tense, involving, and exhausting 2½ hours for the audience, never mind the actors.

Julie Fox's simple, understated set on the Festival Theatre's thrust stage takes us backwards into the Middle Ages and into a kingdom of death.  The floor is covered with granular material resembling soil.  The sides are edged with irregular lines of stones.  The back wall is a series of alcoves containing skeletal trees, leafless, and lit from below with cold blue-white light.  Indeed, Michael Walton's lighting designs are critical to the success of the play in which colour in costumes and props is almost entirely muted down.

Inevitably, though, the play stands or falls by the actor playing Macbeth, since almost the entire action of the play is triggered by him.  Ian Lake played out his active scenes with a strong voice and powerful physical presence.  Less successful were the soliloquies.  Although these were all effectively staged, Lake delivered them with over-long rhetorical pauses and underlinings, such as "Tomorrow.... (big pause) and tomorrow.... (bigger pause) and.... (huge pause) to - mor - row...."  The effect was such that these were no longer the musings of an active mind but instead became a case of an Actor Performing Big Speeches.  These soliloquies were the biggest weakness of the play.

Krystin Pellerin as Lady Macbeth played the dualities of her character very clearly.  The scene in which she persuades Macbeth to fall in with her murderous plan was a masterpiece of psychological persuasion.  Her sleepwalking scene was nicely poised on the edge of frantic without quite tipping over.

Joseph Ziegler was in fine form as the old king, Duncan, a monarch with a more common touch, a man instead of just a walking figurehead of Majesty.

Scott Wentworth gave a first-rate performance of Banquo, balancing the extremes of loyalty and ambition with a believable humanity and feeling of reality.

The banquet scene with its two ghosts was brilliantly staged so that the ghosts appeared at opposite ends of the table, and the brilliant flashes of lightning neatly concealed the exact moments when the two ghosts -- both looking quite hideous in their effective make-up -- stepped into place.  Underlined with a subtle but intense electronic score, this became one of the high points in the dramatic intensity of the play as a whole.

Michael Blake had a magnificent moment as Macduff when told of the murder of his wife and children.  From then on he dominated and centred the action of the play.

The Porter has only one scene, but Cyrus Lane made a fine Shakespearean clown figure, younger than the part is often played.  His word games and jokes thereby added youthful energy to their other comic possibilities.

Sarah Afful was sweetly maternal in her one short scene as Lady Macduff, culminating in a brief but brutal beating by the murderers before she was dragged away.  Her offstage dying shriek was amplified and echoed multiple times until it seemed that even her husband hundreds of miles away must have heard her -- a blood-curdling sound effect.

As played by Antoine Yared, Malcolm was almost too young, but that gave his speeches of self-doubt more point and meaning.  At the end, his youth gave way to an adult as the nobles proclaimed him king and hoisted him shoulder-high in centre stage.

And that brings us to the three characters whose words trigger the entire dramatic action of the play: the three witches.  Heavily made up with ghost-like, almost skeletal faces, and decked in grey and black ragged robes, this trio avoided the strange caperings that sometimes make these scenes descend into silliness.  Moving and speaking with deliberation were their keynotes.  Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, and Lanise Antoine Shelley matched each other in an interpretation which chilled through its very lack of excess.

Their third scene, in which they conjure up the three apparitions, was performed around a cauldron lit from inside with orange light, as if it contained fire instead of simply sitting on a fire -- a violent contrast to the general cold, grey nightlight of the rest of the stage.  They circled the cauldron slowly, ceremoniously, moving in time with the natural rhythm of the words.

At the play's final moment, as the nobles repeatedly acclaimed King Malcolm, three figures on the outskirts of the crowd turned around and revealed themselves as the three weird sisters -- a chilling final vignette.

"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't."  That line of Lady Macbeth's could stand as a metaphor for the entire play, which is full of the kinds of two-faced, ironic lines that call to mind the oracles of Greek tragedy -- most notably in the mysterious speeches of the three weird sisters.  The special strength of this production is that it captures the same kinds of dualities in all the major characters, so bringing us face to face with the unpleasant and inconvenient truth that almost any of us might be capable of becoming a Macbeth or a Lady Macbeth, under the right circumstances.

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