Chekhov's Mistress
“Here May You See the Tyrant” - Notes on the Goold/Stewart Macbeth at BAM
The beauty of Shakespeare’s language can weather any treatment. Evidence: Rupert Goold’s Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a testament to that tenacity with which words can tower over an overwrought production.
Set against a backdrop of Stalinist Russia, Macbeth’s bloody ambition is indeed bloody, dripping bloody, amplified, lit up with horror-film inspired bloody backdrops, Orwellian film clips and rap-music flourishes. As movies go, it was thrilling, excepting of course that it was a play. At the end the audience stood and clapped, but not as excitedly as I’ve seen at some great performances, perhaps worn out by the three hours of intensity or perhaps confused at whether or not they were at the movies, clapping for absent actors and set directors.
But despite my feeling that we were being spoon-fed Shakespeare, Goold’s Macbeth was extraordinarily fun. The cast extracted every bit of drama from their roles, and Patrick Stewart honed in on a critical layer of Macbeth’s tragic character: the tyrant’s vision, that absolute belief in self, no matter how unnatural, no matter how many atrocities are required, no matter the price. Ben Brantley observes in the New York Times:
“This Macbeth has been cursed by a depth of vision, an ability to conjure up the rippling consequences of every action he undertakes, that eventually leads him to the bleak plains of existential emptiness. Mr. Goold and Mr. Stewart make it clear that Macbeth is really killed not by Macduff (Michael Feast) but by his own willingness to be killed. It’s suicide by nihilism.”
Clear indeed. The scene of Macbeth’s death was more reminiscent of the quiet acceptance of defeat by Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) in Star Wars than Shakespeare’s text: “Yet I will try the last…And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” Macbeth has Macduff under his knife, but then casually tosses it aside before ‘Exeunt, fighting.’
While Shakespeare’s plays are often given modern settings, few are as detailed or as effective as Goold’s. At times the tyrannical, paranoid Stalinist Macbeth seems eerily right on. During a banquet scene (where Macbeth’s ally Banquo is invited but does not appear because he’s been assassinated by Macbeth’s thugs who fail to kill Banquo’s son as well) Macbeth plays the role of unpredictable omni-powerful man, menacing to those even in his innermost circle. Watching that scene I was reminded of the story of Stalin’s death when he lay unconscious for hours because no doctor or even his family had the courage to knock on his door. Another scene, with Ross, who is a Thane by Shakespeare but appears here more as a bureaucrat or apparatchik, strongly evokes torture, entirely sealing the setting more so than the Russian music or other elements.
But the Stalinist setting is but one as Goold also plays with the underwold of Macbeth’s witches and ghosts. The morgue-like stage is the fitting backdrop for Damien-like Weïrd sisters (the witches) who dress in nurses habits and servants uniforms with the evil banality of the devil worshippers next door in Rosemary’s Baby. Their presence is sometimes comic, not always scripted, but always effective in reminding us that there is something more behind man’s evil. Seyton, who is one of Macbeth’s underlings, appears something like a gyrating Riff Raff (from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) in one scene, is also comically scary throughout.
But nowhere is the affect of an otherworldly evil portrayed more clearly than in Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth. Her first scene, set in stark light where her blood red lipstick leads the lines “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, / To cry ‘Hold, hold!’” Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth teetered between a desperate evil and ambitious housewife whose sexuality is a source of power and to my mind the play itself was not as strong after her last scene.
Mr. Goold’s ability to toy with evil and humor at the same time fits very much my impression of Shakespeare’s spirit. His production is what it is, excessive in a rich Julie Taymor-ish visual way, and every bit Shakespeare via Scorcese, yet I’d choose three hours at BAM’s Harvey Theater with this Shakespeare whose words are more vibrant still over what’s being written today.
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