Undermining Shakespeare

Macbeth
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

When Nicol Williamson, in the closing scenes of Trevor Nunn’s production of Macbeth (Aldwych), harangues his doctor (‘Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it’), he throws a cloak over the poor man’s head, thereby adding greatly to his error and confusion. 

When he has had enough of this game, he brusquely orders the doctor to unhood himself. ‘Pull’t off, I say’ is the line, and this reading of it is certainly ingenious. It is generally taken to refer to Macbeth’s armour, which only a few lines before he has ordered to be put on, and to denote his restlessness and essential lack of purpose. There is, I suppose, no way of proving these things. The new interpretation seems to me laborious and unrevealing compared with the accepted one, but it could be that Mr. Nunn has miraculously uncovered a significance long concealed.

I doubt it, though. When we see the new use to which he has put the old line we murmur ‘How clever’, and this kind of congratulation is just what Mr. Nunn is aiming for, though I doubt if he would admit it, least of all to himself. It is a perfect example of the paltry academicism which underlies—and undermines—so many Shakespearean productions. It glares with especial ferocity in this one, since so little energy is expended on bringing the characters alive. The supporting cast strut before in grey plaids, sounding even duller than they look. The English scene, though considerably cut (the whole performance lasts less than two hours, without an interval), is an interminable conversation between two characters I hardly knew, so slight had been their previous impact. Gordon Jackson, who once played Horatio to Mr. Williamson’s Hamlet, now makes him a nice friendly Banquo who hints at stirrings of ambition within his own nature and Ron Pember is an ingratiating porter. Otherwise everything depends on the two principals. 

Helen Mirren’s Lady Macbeth is firmer than at Stratford, she plunges into evil with gusto, goes arrestingly to pieces when the murder is discovered and somnambulates with style. Her tortured conversations with her husband on the subject of sleep are the most gripping exchanges of the evening. But her performance remains evanescent, a series of moments.

With Mr. Williamson it is the same, only more so. He cuts a jagged and apparently heedless path through much of the verse, punctuating it eccentrically (‘making the green one—red recklessly trades the multitudinous seas for a set of traffic-lights’) or not at all, until he arrives at a bit which interests him. Fortunately many of these are the peaks of the play; there are moments that take us—naturally and unfussily—straight inside Macbeth’s world. 

Advancing confidently enough towards Duncan’s chamber, Mr. Williamson suddenly stands still and forces us to see the visionary dagger, as he later compels us to see the ghost of Banquo and the show of kings—neither of which, in this production, actually materialises on stage. His reaction to his wife’s death is extraordinary—half resigned sneer, half baffled growl, and chilly and properly ignoble; while his most sustained success is his briefing of Banquo’s murderers. He tempts them with a staccato volley of words and when he is sure of them relaxes into a studiedly casual affability, like a coiled snake with a poisoned tongue at the ready.

Some unexpectedly beguiling passages even suggest—as more consistently, does Paul Scofield’s Prospero at Wydham’s— that old-style verbal musical may be on its way back. But it is more characteristic of Mr. Williamson to preface his lines with a kind of half-formed verbal shrug as who should say ‘I haven’t quite got the words to express what I feel, but this is the best I can do.’ This mannerism has infected most of the cast, and it makes for a querulous evening. Sometimes the shrug becomes an actual syllable, the classical equivalent of the interjections which instead actors in modern plays employ to bolster up the pretence of naturalism (‘look’ is a favourite, much in evidence at the Royal Court this week) or the upward inflection with which Americans convert every statement into a question.

Mr. Nunn has cut down on his setting—last year it was a church, this year a ruined church—and has also abandoned some of the striking opening effects: the Satanic shadow-play, the witches perched on a chandelier. Obviously he has been heeding the wrong critics; this is the only example I remember of a production and performance significantly deteriorating between Stratford and the Aldwych.