Macbeth

In the programme for Sport for Jove’s Macbeth, actor-director Damien Ryan’s notes suggest an intriguing twist. Rather than gung-ho revelling in blood – spillage of characters’ and curdling of the audience’s – this production emphasises the human aspects of the play: lost children, motherhood, the inexorable passage of time. While the ghastly elements aren’t glossed over, they are given an emotional basis in the question: to what kinds of extreme acts can love drive people?

It is said of the Mahabharata that no Hindu encounters the text for the first time, such is its cultural ubiquity; and the same is true for the Shakespearean oeuvre within the English literary tradition. Especially those plays that are the most famous (or, in the case of Macbeth, infamous: superstitious actors prefer its euphemism ‘the Scottish play’), we hear the best-known lines before we find out where they have come from – or even that they are quotations.

Past performances haunt a new production like overdubs, or ghostly outlines, or the blood that Lady Macbeth can never entirely remove from her hands, no matter how many times she washes them. In the case of Macbeth, it was not a specific show that framed my expectations, but the way I had imagined it on first reading it as a child, a reading which instantly claimed it as my favourite: a mental image drawn in black and white and scarlet, in which a Bela Lugosi-like figure of Macbeth loomed – tormented, perhaps, but also one-dimensionally evil. The fascination of the play was its blood and guts, its supernatural darkness, its abundance of murder, madness and the macabre.

So it was with some misgivings that I read the programme, as I took my seat in the beautiful open-air theatre at the Everglades, three pairs of perfectly tended hedges forming the wings that flank a cropped-lawn stage, centring on a small ornate pool topped by classically-themed stone carvings. It looked too charming and picturesque for Macbeth.

The Wyrd Sisters seemed at first to confirm these suspicions: instead of cackling hags, three girls skipped about in white dresses, laughing the rhymes as accompaniment to a game of hopscotch. Little girls as witches? A nuanced, emotionally sensitive Macbeth? Of course I wanted to watch with an open mind, and to enjoy a new take on an old favourite. But it was hard to ignore my own child-self, looking grumpily over my shoulder and bristling at the prospect of betrayal: ‘those sisters don’t look very wyrd to me!’

In fact, though – as even my inner child had to admit by the end – the charm and efficacy of this production is in its contrasts of light and shade. When the play begins, despite the aftermath of war, the honour of the nation is still an intact concept: traitors are denounced, and upstanding heroes rewarded. Although, as he returns as victorious Thane of Cawdor, a shadow of jealousy crosses Macbeth’s mind when he sees Malcolm given an even greater honour, Prince of Cumberland. The other actors freeze, and he stalks about the stage, giving vent to the envy he hides from the others, in a foreshadowing of his later duplicity.

There can be no lighting effect more evocative of the darkness settling over Scotland than the slow fading of daylight as the play goes on. The Wyrd Sisters play a giant came of cats-cradle; this time, the contrast between the purity of their white summer dresses and the ghoulishness of their rhymes not only accentuates their eeriness, but saves the characters from cliché.

There’s a curious paradox to Ryan’s decision to make the Wyrd Sisters into the ghosts of Macduff’s daughters, moving back through time to avenge themselves: their prophecy triggers the events that leads to their slaughter, in a circular chain of causality. But in a play about the abrogation of every kind of nature, this rupture in common sense does not seem inapposite. In fact much of the power of the show derives from such discords. Between scenes, a song plays ‘from’ an on-set gramophone – ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ – and the dissonance between its wistfulness and the outbursts of violence just past, or about to take place, give the ominous sense of corruption, of an unnaturalness that infects every inch of the land.

There are some odd points that detract a little from this otherwise enjoyable and original production. Banquo’s murderers are awkward and curiously unformed, somewhere between extras from Goodfellas and the bumbling twin detectives from Tintin, Thomson and Thompson; they could have done with a clearer decision about the kind of left-handedness they embody – either more gauche or more sinister. And turning King Duncan into a queen feels a little arbitrary and meddling. But those are mere blips.

Amy Matthews is an outstanding Lady Macbeth, managing to infuse each stage of her evolution – urging her husband to regicide, trying to contain the social damage caused by his subsequent visions of ghosts, and finally her own descent into madness – with fine judgement and authenticity.

The play’s journey as a whole is thread around the interwoven paths of the Macbeths, so it’s significant that Ryan’s own portrayal of Macbeth displays an equally masterful progression of character. By the end, he has shown us a meditation on the nature of evil that is all the more profound – and fearful – for its perspective: evil from the inside. And of course, for all the production’s subtlety, there’s plenty of fighting and stabbing. By the end of the play, even as stern a critic as my inner child was thoroughly satisfied.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Sport for Jove present
Macbeth
Director: Damien Ryan
Design: Anna Gardiner
Cast: Damien Ryan, Amy Mathews, Danielle King, James Lugton, Matt Edgerton, Barry French, Christopher Tomkinson, Terry Karabelas, Michael Cullen, Lizzie Schebesta, Stacey Duckworth, Amanda Stephens-Lee, Eloise Winestock, Christopher Stalley, Eric Beecroft & Ed Lembke-Hogan.

Everglades Historic House & Garden, Leura
January 7–22, 2012
Norman Lindsay Gallery, Faulconbridge
January 27 & 28, 2012

Bookings: www.sportforjove.com.au or 1300 111 369