Triple, triple toil and trouble. In August, the RSCs Macbeth; later this month David Tennant and Cush Jumbo at the Donmar. Meanwhile, Simon Godwin’s production of Macbeth comes with seductive casting: Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma are the magnetic killers. It also makes an attempt to reach a wider audience, as it is staged in a series of converted warehouses in Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Washington DC.
This is not site-specific like Kenneth Branagh’s production ten years ago: performed in a deconsecrated church in Manchester (where the candles were extinguished all evening), the theme and setting being completely coordinated. Yet it envelops its audience in the play’s disruptive discomfort. No plush. A chill in the air: spectators kept their coats on. Sounds unpadded in a metal room. The auditorium is approached through an antechamber of destruction. Frankie Bradshaw – rising star in the field of set design – has created a wasteland of fallen telegraph poles, chunks of masonry, a half-exploded tree and a burnt-out car. Smoke curls up; embers glow, delicately lit by Jai Morjaria. Amid the distant noise and drone of explosions came the thin tinkling of a music box.
This would simply be a desolate decoration were it not for Fiennes and Varma’s skill in projecting the ambiguous quality that fuels the piece. For all its bloody dynamism, Macbeth revolves subtly, with the view of what is true and factual continually escaping and dissolving. The Macbeths deliver some of Shakespeare’s most empathetic speeches when they are at their most brutal.
Harriet Walter concentrates physically, upright and unyielding as a hammer
The couple is wonderful together: they suggest complicit silences even while speaking. They encourage each other to commit regicide with small, intimate dialogues. Also unusually strong. It can seem like Fiennes is sneaking up on his side, hovering over it with his intelligence. Sometimes he overdoes it by mimicking the action – pointing to his heart – so that big speeches almost become a shadow play. Very clear, but very much so. Yet he can keep the verse on time, with exceptionally direct and natural emphasis. Through a period of mild hysteria he changes from a decent, not too gruff soldier into a snarling murderer. Bradshaw’s costumes reflect this, moving from bulky combat gear – green and brown camouflage, raw edges everywhere with belts, buckles and backpack – to formal military suits and a sharp suit. He becomes his own dagger. Varma is a great Lady Macbeth. Free from histrionics, she sees the murder as an inevitable career move, but unravels with tears at the loss of her love. In a sweater and V-neck trousers, she is elegant and managerial: like a French film star from the 60s.
Billed as “adapter”, Emily Burns has cut the doorman off, which is a relief on the whole, especially as the evening is not a cheerful one; Fiennes provides a sardonic chuckle. The strange sisters are at the top and following the action (hurrah!), speaking with conviction. Yet their wonderful, wild curses are exaggerated and, dressed in puffa coats over torn skirts and trousers, they seem all too obvious as the outsider voice of truth. There is a sentimentality that, repelled by the idea of women being demonized, does not allow them to be untrustworthy. Good to see real Birnam Wood branches being waved – but more leaves are needed if they are to act as cover.
Amid the horrors, there are moments that suggest a discussion about “all that a man can become.” Ben Turner makes Macduff all the more admirable as he breaks down at the news of his slaughtered family. Meanwhile, Jonathan Case makes Seyton’s small part glow with emotion; his drop earring starts to look like a teardrop.
Rebecca Frecknall is helping to change the vocabulary of classical drama: her dance-infused productions make the barrier between naturalism and disruptive dreams seem permeable. She started the year with a great rethinking of A tram called Desire. She ends it with a cool reconsideration of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 drama about a martinet mother and the five daughters she locks in virginal seclusion. Considered Lorca’s most realistic play (no symbolic moon figures wandering the stage; all characters have proper names), it is easy to see in Bernarda Alba’s house an image of political tyranny. It was completed weeks before the coup that started the civil war and just months before the playwright was murdered by a firing squad. It was not commercially produced in Spain while Franco was in power.
Frecknall is well equipped to deal with the dangers of British Lorca stagings: an overdose of Spanish fervor (stallions snorting around every corner); too much pallor (as if channeled through). Cranford); becoming so entranced by symbols that the action slackens. Alice Birch brings a history of family drama to her film adaptation: she worked on it Successionand they Anatomy of a suicide Eloquently explored the damage passed down through generations of women.
Everything is intelligent, but the purpose is too clear. Birch’s emphatic version extends the late patriarch’s sexual predation to abuse of his stepdaughter. She brings to the stage the figure of a desirable man performing a slow, muscular dance. The women’s favorite adjective is “fucking,” which is a joke, or a wish – because that’s not something they’re allowed to do. In Merle Hensel’s striking design – a dollhouse prison spanning the entire height of the stage – the family appears first in silhouette. Side by side in separate cells/bedrooms, the five daughters (and their crazy grandmother) press themselves against the windows to watch, against the walls to listen, slowly undress and sob. Bed heads, chairs, mirrors, the fence that keeps men at a distance, are iron outlines. The house is a skeleton: a body without flesh. It’s a brilliant X-ray of the piece: but coldly graphic rather than suffocating, explaining rather than implicating it.
Related: ‘I studied the play at school – I hated it’: Cush Jumbo and David Tennant on playing the Macbeths
Harriet Walter is an amazing matriarch. Silent and alert, she concentrates physically, as upright and unyielding as a hammer. She has lost the caressing dip in her voice that she had as a young woman: the delivery is adamant, as clenched as her limbs – until the end. As the bluntest of the sisters, Eliot Salt provides a welcome, clear-sighted levity. Bryony Hannah is particularly convincing as a made-up maid: her life is as diminished as those of her mistresses, she slides around like a painful punctuation mark.
Star ratings (out of five)
Macbeth ★★★★
Bernarda Alba’s house ★★★