Overlapping with a Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC’s will soon be followed by productions from English Touring Theatre, the Donmar (led by David Tennant) and a touring version with Ralph Fiennes.
While the likeliest reason for this glut is the current topicality of a play about someone desperate for power but hopeless in office, this intense competition encourages directors to seek original readings. Such strenuous freshness is alternately a blessing and curse of Wils Wilson’s version.
Unusually, it is cast authentically Scottish, led by Reuben Joseph’s compelling Macbeth. Hinting at demonic possession, he brings a clarifying agony to the soliloquies, suggesting a future Hamlet and Othello.
Controversially, to purists, the Porter’s speech, 17th-century standup that keeps audiences sullenly sitting now, has been rewritten by Stewart Lee. In itself, the scene is a pleasure: Alison Peebles, surely auditioning in passing for Lear’s Fool, satisfyingly lands expert Lee one-liners targeting hedge-funders and GCSE school parties. While removing the Porter’s rants about “equivocators” (code for undercover Jesuit priests), the spirit is maintained with material about Boris Johnson who is, if perhaps equivocally, a Catholic.
But a high publicity rewrite draws more attention to the problem scene than productions that simply bear it and hope the audience might grin. And, while individual elements can seem over thought, the overall concept feels under considered. This version follows the Globe in making Duncan a Queen. But, if women can seize power, Valene Kane’s charismatic Lady Macbeth doesn’t need to run her husband as a candidate. And, while Scotland is a post-climate catastrophe wasteland, lit by wind-up torches, England seems sunny and prosperous with clean water that Scots refugees gratefully glug. This seems unlikely to be a vision of independence having failed, so probably the English somehow tricked their neighbours, but the conceptual overlay confuses rather than elucidates the text.
Viewers have much time to puzzle. Sir Gregory Doran, the former RSC artistic director, argues in his recent book on Shakespeare that, in Macbeth, “the furious pace of the text is crucial; things happen in this terrible whirlwind”. Wilson goes more for a building breeze, the show pushing three hours, a third longer than many productions, despite some textual trimming.
One reason is elongation of the stage directions. The final battle between Macbeth and Macduff, described in a single line, seems to go on as long as the Somme. More happily, Julia Cheng’s choreography for the witches (Amber Sylvia Edwards, Eilidh Loan, Dylan Read), though extending their stage time, brings gains in tumbling, troubling routines suggesting rabid puppies playing together. A conductor who took Verdi’s Macbeth this slowly would be booed, but the weird trio and the arias of Joseph and Kane win bravos.
At the RSC until 14 October
