Review by Carla Riley
‘Macbeth’ at the Globe Theatre, London
There is a certain irony in choosing to see one of Shakespeare’s darker tragedies-one which shows the murder of children and a father’s loss and revenge-on Fathers day!
Director Lucy Bailey has taken inspiration for the brutal Scottish setting and origins of the play from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for the greater part the visual look of the play succeeds in its vision of a hell, both of the mind and of the place it portrays. The instant you sit down (for us the middle gallery) and see at least a hundred or more patrons with standing tickets, transformed into a living hell, headless bodies poking out from a large black cover attached to the stage. This is used to great effect when even before the play begins, the three witches creep underneath and around on the ground, popping up and scaring those who at that point most likely wished they had less audience participation.
This play is and always was meant to depict violence, Macbeth’s rise and fall, his greed, lust and desire for power at any cost. From the moment the witches’ prophesise his ascent to ‘the throne of Cawdor’ we believe that he will succeed, yet lose everything. Elliot Cowan gives a thrilling (and much muscled) performance as Macbeth (as in so many of Shakespeare’s plays) the shift between order and disorder, sanity and insanity is subtle yet apparent over time, allowing us to feel sympathy as well as disgust for Macbeth’s actions. He is trapped in a situation wholly of his own making.
Scenes of impact within the theme of hell on earth were used to great shock value (again poor standing patrons at the front) with the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, ironically becoming a central part of Macbeth’s banquet. Shakespeare’s scanty stage direction of ‘ghost appears and sits in Macbeth’s place’ is re-imagined with an inventive use of trap doors beneath the stage, allowing Banquo’s bloody corpse to emerge from a large plate of food to torment and scare characters and audience alike. We see what Macbeth sees but the others do not, we become implicit to his crime, a sort of guilt by association.
The Globe theatre itself, however, has limitations for the modern theatre goer and actors performing. When it was re-built (or re-imagined) to be as accurate as possible to the original they did not seem to be aware or concerned how a contemporary theatre goer would have quite so many interruptions from the modern world around the theatre. As Macbeth laments ‘Pity…upon the sightless curriers of the air’ (1:7) he had fear of being drowned out by both plane and helicopters, both regularly circling overhead, neither welcome for authenticity or atmosphere.
The Globe’s customary song and dance, after the finale (signalling life goes on after the curtain falls) seems a jolt here, despite its Scottish feel. After so much horror and death, something so upbeat and positive will either bring a smile to your face or leave you feeling oddly detached, but either way…glad to be alive.
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