Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Macbeth
Hart House Theatre, Equity Showcase Theatre
The globe and mail

ROBERT Lepage's production of Macbeth, recently performed by the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, begins tremendously with the three witches hanging upside-down; talk about the suspension of disbelief. Then Macbeth and Banquo appear, riding. They are not actually on horseback, but they are performing a detailed and energetic equestrian mime, which they accompany with much syncopated stomping of feet. They are joined by a couple of message-bearing thanes who are executing the same routine. In the received text this is the play's third scene; the first two have been cut.

So might this one be, for all the information we get from it. The Weird Sisters, immune to vertigo, have no trouble communicating the sense and the feeling of their lines, which, being venomous doggerel, are not that challenging. The mortals are handed complex blank verse, not easy for student actors to get across and downright impossible if their voices and their bodies are beating out rhythms that are at cross-purposes with one another. A dozen dramatic signals go unregistered, all sacrificed to one gratuitous effect. The important things that happen to Macbeth and company in this scene could equally well happen to them on foot. And they look pretty silly doing it.

One thing that sets Lepage apart from most conceptual or gestural or performance-oriented or anti-textual directors (choose your label; none of them quite fits) is his obvious trust and belief in actors. However graphic his effects, the people in his shows have carried the weight. But here he has either lost faith in his cast or, more likely, he has overestimated them. Either way, he has staged a puppet show.

It even looks like one. The stage can expand or contract, vertically. Sometimes it has its full height; at others it's a letterbox. Since there are definite Japanese traces in staging, costume and hair styles, the actors often resemble Bunraku marionettes; you expect to see human manipulators alongside them. At crucial moments in Macbeth's descent you do see the witches silently crouching beneath the main action as if controlling it. When it isn't a puppet-play it's a shadow-play. Giant silhouettes are cast on the back wall with majestic spookiness.

They are impressive, but so they would be in any context. Devices like this can help intensify the terror in Macbeth but they cannot generate it. That can be done only by the players.

They actually look weaker here than they might in a less overpowering presentation. The traditional amateur virtues - intelligence and vigour - are neutralized. And the production's principal device fails to register except as an irritant. The men are played by women and the women by men. This may be a commendable blow for Equal Opportunity, but an audience can hardly be expected to get off on that. Since nobody is acting with much conviction anyway it hardly matters which gender they are.

Lady Macbeth (Patrick Garrow) dutifully switches on some extra voltage for the "unsex me here" speech but switches it off immediately after. When Macbeth (Anna Migliarisi) comes home, the two of them go into an elaborate clinch. But conventionally cast couples can do that too. (And do; every production of Macbeth thinks that it's the first to discover sex.) The splitting of the bond between them is more powerful than its sealing; Lady M's slumped acceptance of her husband's independent criminal career after the banquet leads logically to her somnambulistic breakdown. The minor character of Lennox became, in one ironic monologue, the most fully realized person on stage. Whether the portrayal of Duncan as an especially vexing English nanny was accident or design I cannot say; it certainly made a new and persuasive case for regicide.

There is cross-casting, too, in the Equity Showcase Macbeth, but it is less pervasive. Three male roles - Duncan, Banquo, Old Siward - are played by actresses; and only at the end had I worked out the rationale for this. These are all fathers whose children are either killed or threatened by Macbeth and they presumably seem more bereaved if they in effect double as mothers. Macduff loses his children too, of course, but as the text provides him with a wife he is allowed to keep his manhood. He is played by a Polish actor; I don't know whether we are meant to register this as more non-traditional casting, or simply to accept the actor (Vieslav A. Krystyan) on his own considerable merits. His collapse at the news of his family's massacre is done with uncompromising power.

So is the massacre itself; so is the attempted killing of Banquo's son Fleance. The production presents the Macbeths' career as a revenge of the childless on the fertile. It is so stated in the program, and it is intermittently noticeable on the stage. Macbeth, having dispatched Young Siward in the final scene, gives his dismissive epitaph - "thou wast born of woman" - a peculiarly malignant sting; though, just to make sure we get the point, the victim, who is fighting in a full-scale professional battle, is played as a 10-year-old. Which is not believable. "Macbeth," says the program, "does not murder people; he attacks families." So, if you think about it, does any murderer who does not restrict himself to killing childless orphans. Resentment at his lack of an heir helps to corrode Macbeth, but it is not what first motivates him. He makes no attempt to kill Duncan's sons along with the father, though doubtless he would get round to them in time. Like many partial interpretations, this one is more impressive as a disembodied bright idea than as part of a story told by actors.

The old chestnut "how many children had Lady Macbeth?" - once a sure laugh-getter in academic circles - has come round again with renewed seriousness. When the lady talks about having given suck, a Macbeth brooding on his childlessness should surely take some interest; this one just stands there, arms akimbo. Indeed, the actor, David Schurmann, is singularly impassive in the earlier part, strolling through temptation, murder and kingship with scarcely a flicker. Only when his world begins to crumble and viciousness sets in does he come to snarling, desperate life. He reverses his wife's diagnosis; he is quite without ambition but a wiz at the illness that attends it. His partner, Kate Lynch, lights a fire under him regardless, and her desolate cry in the sleepwalking scene sounds, as it should, like a soul at the end of its tether.

Alex Fallis's staging has at least one brilliant moment - the sudden dissolution of the witches to a heap of rags on the ground - and the general acting level is alert and alive. With all its eccentricities, this showcase has something to show.