This week we experienced Cheek by Jowl's Macbeth.
I'm recording my thoughts about it for my own future benefit , because when/if we come to do it again (and I'm thinking 2012) I would like to remember some of the highs and lows of this inspired but equally troubled production. I would like to pretend that I will remember it in detail, but sad experience has taught me otherwise.
This photo is not from Cheek by Jowl's Macbeth, but David Widdowson as Stephen in my Playing Faustus. I like it better than any of the available images from CbyJ, which are tense and monochrome.
David had a good first stab at Macbeth in the days when I knew nothing about directing Shakespeare. Both he & I have come a long way since then, as his magnificent Stephen/Faustus demonstrated He badly wants to do try M again, and I'm toying with the idea.
Round up of reviews The Cheek by Jowl version made me think about the play afresh - as they always do. They take the pieces of a play, throw them into a hat and shake them up vigorously, and chuck them on the floor to see what comes out.
They don't feel the need to keep the Stuffed Stag - which graced every As You Like It at the RSC from 1880 until 1951. They don't feel the need to have swords, daggers, blood, food, letters or armour. Equally they don't feel the need to have separate actors for Donalbain, Fleance, young Macduff, Seton, Ross, Monteith, Angus etc, which is liberating in the extreme. We started down this path with our wonderful jazz age tea-sipping, gin-soaked witches, who turned up all over the place, as murderers. the porter, banquet guests, the doctor... But Cheek by Jowl don't feel the need to keep the witches either.
Macbeth without the witches? There are two reasons why this doesn't work. One is psychological. Some web critics were confused by the non-visible witches (two women's voices, and the company whispering) into thinking that both Banquo and Macbeth were imagining them. But this surely does serious damage to the fabric of the play. Actually, I don't think we were supposed to think them imagined, any more than we were supposed to think that Macbeth's mimed daggers and bloody hands weren't real - but it gets confusing when you have an invisible dagger (Is this a dagger I see before me?) that is not real, and invisible daggers that are real. And I realise I hate mime.
The second reason is also about the structure of the play - I always argue strenuously for keeping Shakespeare's scene structure, even in the most residual form (e.g. a song replacing a little scene) because the audience absolutely needs what I call 'the bridging scenes' which give you some relief (not necessarily comic) between the high points. In this version, you get relentless Macbeth and/or Lady Macbeth from the opening until the England scene. And when the Macbeths are as frenetic, unbalanced and intense as this couple it's completely disengaging. One simply switches off to them, in spite of being within spitting distance of, and apparently direct eye contact with Macbeth, during almost every one of his soliloquies.
The witches, as well as the other little scenes, are necessary breaks, which allow us to draw breath. Otherwise we collapse exhausted.
What was good about this production? If one had never seen a Cheek by Jowl before, one would have been blown away from the amazing energy, the wonderful graceful precision of the movement, the beauty created with the simplest means - a few people in black, brilliantly positioned and lit, making a moving pictures to die for. Beautiful live music, percussion, dance. One would also have been excited by the constant gesture, the stumbling and rushes of the speech, making it sound as if newly minted by the character - about as far from the traditional slow, static delivery of old as it's possible to get.
The trouble is, we have seen them before, and all this is now routine, and worse, it has now become so codified and exaggerated as to be as bad as Donald Wolfit spouting by the Stuffed Stag. No one can stand still. No one can look another actor in the eye. No-one can speak to the audience and really speak to the audience. No-one can say a line just as it is written, as if it were poetry.
The production reminded me that the difference between a Macbeth that works and one that doesn't is fundamentally one of humanity - do we feel for the Macbeths, for Banquo and the Macduffs, in different ways, of course, as human beings. When Macbeth cuts his wife out of his life, when he says "I am in blood stepped in so far, that to go back would be as tedious as go o'er" - we should care about his decline, even though we abhor him. The Macbeths in this production were unhinged and unengaging from the start, with none of the charisma and charm that they need to succeed in their evil. The high points for all of us in my little group was the England scene, with Macduff's very real emotion at the death of his wife, even though he had clearly been told to play it was deadpan as possible.
On the whole, this production was liberating - you can do without broadswords, but you cannot do without the human heart.
