Macbeth
RSC’s The Other Place
Playing until 6 December
I thought when the RSC schedule came out that I would give this production a miss. I have seen too many Macbeths, most of them unconvincing or unlikely in some way, like Peter O’Toole knocking the set down and then playing the rest of the run for laughs, or Macbeth and Banquo sitting in half a car while Jane Horrocks wees on stage and has it mopped up by waiting women with supermarket kitchen roll, or several RSC productions where the witches were played by children, either running around or above the stage in a cargo net, or Jonathan Slinger delivering Act V at the top of as stepladder on a bare stage, or Duncan receiving the Bloody Captain in bed with children apparently sleeping on the floor round his bed, or countless risible attempts to portray Banquo’s ghost. And then I saw Daniel Raggett’s wonderful production of Edward II and thought that he surely couldn’t make a mess of Macbeth.
But then out came the publicity material, talking about Macbeth being set in a Glasgow pub and I thought I might have booked a rubbish ticket for Macbeth again. How wrong could I be?
It’s great to see The Other Place in regular use again and great to see an article about the wonderful Buzz Goodbody in the programme. This time The Other Place is configured in the round, just like it used to be in the old rusty shed, but now with a posher look. So although we are not in the cast we are still in the pub, passive witnesses to what is going on right under our eyes. It’s inevitable, then, that we think of contemporary events as we watch without them having to be pointed out to us.
At the start Gilly Gilchrist’s Duncan is an ordinary as you can get making me think that some modern leaders are both honest and trustworthy, like Jeremy Corbin, for instance, not needing to be ruthless, hypocritical or scheming to be trusted, but willing to go for the jugular when he encounters traitors. In contrast Sam Heughan’s Macbeth is an alpha male, physically imposing but exhibiting scruples at the beginning of the play which we don’t entirely trust.
Daniel Raggett presents the relationship between Macbeth and Lia Williams’s Lady Macbeth as sensual and loving, but at the same time the gloomy lighting presents an ominous atmosphere surrounding it. There is no doubt that Lady Macbeth is the driving force, so when Macbeth rejects her and tells her to stay away from him her dismay and despair are obvious, as she wanders about completely bewildered, her behaviour prefiguring what happens to her in the end with her sleepwalking and making entirely credible the way she dies.
There is a good deal of inevitable doubling, but Raggett makes sure that we link the different characters being played. It is a masterstroke to have Gilly Gilchrist return at the end as Old Siward, linking Old Siward with Duncan without having to labour the point.
What this production does is slowly build suspicion, both in the minds of the characters and in the minds of the audience. Calum Ross’s Malcolm (Donalbain is cut because he isn’t necessary) is enigmatic from the start: young, impassive, hard to figure out so that his behaviour with Macduff in what I always feel is an interminable Act IV Scene iii is entirely believable and fuels audience uncertainty about what he is up to in a way that I have never seen done before.
Something else I have not thought of or seen done before is the setting. It’s small and intimate but at the same time it is universal and anywhere. The smallness of the community is emphasised, reminding us that in Macbeth’s time the entire population of Scotland was about 300,000 people. It also made me remember that at the time Shakespeare wrote Macbeth the population of Stratford was about a thousand, a place where everyone knew everyone else’s business and where an individual took on many roles, as the characters do in this production.
There is much to keep the audience attentive and anxious: an extremely loud electronic alarm which punctuates the action and marks it into six separate though linked sections, the way Lady Macbeth is made separate from all the Scottish characters by having an English accent, the graphic and clear way all the killings are presented, the often very well-handled use of judicious pauses, not always when you are expecting them, the fact that it is Fleance who gives Banquo his sword-knife, the presence of Duncan’s coffin in the pub, the addition of a catholic religious element by having a priest in the pub and as the doctor, the extraordinary touch of having the banquet where Banquo’s ghost appears comprised of a take-away, having the ghost of Banquo pour the wine at the banquet, the placement of Macbeth in a chalked circle when he meets the witches, having Lady Macbeth as the third murderer to witness of death of Banquo, and to have her (presumably by doubling) as the one who tells Lady Macduff to escape.
This less is more production is brimming with ideas with fine acting from Lia Williams and Sam Heughan in particular. It might well be the best production of Macbeth I have seen.