Macbeth at Shakespeare and Co.

June 19, 2002 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Shakespeare’s plays are so universal in meaning that, for hundreds of years, directors have been interpreting them as comments on a particular period in history and setting them in times other than that indicated in the script. In Macbeth now playing at Shakespeare and Company’s Founders Theatre, Tina Packer has chosen to let the play comment on the changes in our society since 9/11.

She has chosen also to present the play in the “bare-bard” style in which all the actors, including Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, play a variety of roles as well as their own starring ones. Such a directorial approach necessitates bold choices, by actors as well as by director. In this production, some work better than others.

The audience adored Michael Hammond as the drunken porter, unexpectedly rising from the “ghost trap” floor, often used for witches and caldron; in this production the witches become scientists in a diabolic lab. (I admired Hammond more in his brief-but-telling role as Old Siward, movingly resigned that his son had died bravely, facing his foe.)

The bawdy passion of Macbeth (Dan McCleary) and his young wife (Carolyn Roberts) worked well in the opening scenes. In the later banquet scene, where the ghost of Banquo (Johnny Lee Davenport) appears, nothing worked, and the scene, usually a tensely dramatic one, was lost.

Dan McCleary, who last season gave us a stunning Coriolanus, seemed miscast and awkward in the role of Macbeth. The rhythms of his soliloquies were broken and strangely stressed, losing all the poetry and the iambic beat. In a bold directorial move, he appears as MacDuff’s precocious child, handling that small role with skill as he parries words with his mother.

The small cast of eight, playing more than thirty roles, performed with gusto, dedication, and at times were very moving. Johnny Lee Davenport and Judith McSpadden spoke and moved beautifully in all situations; Davenport was an especially effective Banquo.

Jason Asprey as McDuff seemed ineffective in establishing his early suspicions of Macbeth, only to rise magnificently in his scene in England when he learns of the death of his wife and children and delivers, with anguished restraint, the question, “What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/at one swoop?”

The plot, as most theatre-goers know, concerns the evil which an essentially brave and loyal man may sink to when he listens to advice he should not, whether it comes from an ambitious young wife or supernatural sources that urge him on. Eventually, he will realize:

I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more
returning were as tedious as go’er.

He will go down in defeat and it seems to be the play’s hope that the gentle rule of King Duncan, full of grace and planting images, will come full circle again in the rule of his son Malcolm.

However, this is one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, and in this production there did not seem much hope of the pall lifting soon. Perhaps such a production is fitting in a world darkened still by 9/11. And despite flaws this is a valiant attempt to acknowledge the darkness.