Is there a heart to this Macbeth? I’m not convinced. Robert Lepage usually excels at the good-faith, high-tech, theatrical extravaganza, and is generally easy-to-clear against charges of empty spectacle. His use of cinematic techniques in a live setting can be stunning. His father-son autobiography 887 was one of the best things I’ve seen on a stage, his Coriolanus (also at Stratford) was a thrilling visual and textual reconsideration of a knotty tragedy, and his opera of The Tempest found superlative magical fantasy with no wires visible.
In Macbeth, every wire is visible. But rather than being thin and sleek, the wires take the form of huge, lumbering platforms upon which stand a towering motel complex, where much of the show’s action is set. They creak when they move and they move slowly and often. They are also operated by largely visible stagehands in head-sets. In this world, Macbeth’s castle of Inverness is a seedy roadside motel which is represented in mutli-level detail. I can appreciate the scale of the vision, and also wanting the emotionality of the play to live in huge scenic components, but I can’t imagine this is the ideal outcome Lepage had in mind. When manipulated during scene changes, the things are just too cumbersome to watch. Surely the goal was more transitional flair.
Lepage sets his Macbeth in the world of a modern biker gang (very Hell’s Angels). Recontextualizing Shakespeare is often fun and daring, but this socially-specific setting ends up being a real head-scratcher. Not to be that guy, but many things just translate so badly in this milieu. As presented here, the culture of “bikers honor” is so opaque as to be unintelligible. We have no faith that Macbeth (Tom McCamus) is any worse a leader than Duncan (David Collins), particularly when the show begins with us seeing the traitorous Thane of Cawdor executed by Duncan’s forces with cinderblocks chained to his ankles and being thrown into a river. The image is spiffy in its staging, but it establishes that in this Sons of Anarchy world, brutality is the law of the land. We’re brought into a theatrical universe where caring about the tortured psyche of the uniquely brilliant but violent Macbeth becomes impossible. We also have zero faith that Malcolm (Austin Eckert) becoming “king” at play’s end will have any restorative effect: they’ll just go on being bikers, and why in an already violent subculture Macbeth inspired so much animosity remains confounding.
The hewing of Birnam Wood feels comically out-of place: the foliage doth not mask your Harley. While the show doesn’t spell it out for us as to whether the three weird sisters (Aidan DeSalaiz, Paul Dunn, and Anthony Palermo) are meant to be drag queens or trans sex workers, either way the context is uncomfortably represented. The fact that the incantations of “double, double, toil and trouble” are invoked in a locale resembling a hospital garbage dump, and the visions that Macbeth gleans from the witches’ prophecies are so obviously psycho-hallucinogenic, makes Macbeth’s belief in their supernatural prowess all the more perplexing. This production goes so far out of its way to downplay any element of the supernatural, that Macbeth’s belief in prophecy feels anachronistically wrong-headed, not to mention his blind-spot for the possibility of running into someone born by C-section.
For a director with such technical agency, the show runs away from anything that could be considered “magical”: all is hyper-literal. Macbeth needs to see a dagger, so a dagger is digitally rendered within a window’s screen. The Thanes are bikers, so onto the stage atop their HOGs they ride. For such a mechanistically ornate production, the result falls quite flat. Surely the director of Cirque du Soleil’s Ka could have managed more fun along the way.
Three moments popped (with reservation): Lady Macbeth falling off the balcony during “tomorrow and tomorrow” was effectively eerie; the smash-cut from the gas station of Banquo’s murder to the BBQ-feast hosted by Macbeth (clothed in a ‘King of the Grill’ apron) was fun, though wildly pleased with itself; and seeing the Thane of Cawdor descend to his watery grave would have been awesome, had the moment not been marred by Lepage inserting movie-style credit projections as part of the show’s opening, a choice that couldn't feel more tacky.
McCamus is a fine actor, but his Macbeth never gets across the footlights. Admittedly, the soliloquy convention sits uncomfortably amidst such hyper-modern machismo, but the interiority of McCamus’s Macbeth feels addressed only to himself, and almost never to his audience. Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth manages to both engage with her audience and bring sparkling clarity, even amidst such heavy directorial interference. Thus, while there is a visual charm to their grizzled ambition, never once do you feel guilty for feeling badly for their plight: you basically – often literally – watch them through glass.
All the performers suffer from a labored sense of pacing: lots of sentences have air enough to run a Triumph through. For a short tragedy with crackjack plotting, this Macbeth is not a nail-biter.
Some actors do fine. Tom Rooney gives a moving rendition of the moment when he as Macduff finds out his family has been murdered. However, Lepage screws this up too by cutting the actual murder scene of Lady Macduff and Son, and turns out you really need that to care about Macduff’s grief and revenge against Macbeth. Basically, Rooney gives a good Macduff in a vacuum. Maria Vacratsis fares the best of any performer, as a front-desk Porter of the Inverness motel, and is both funny in her ribaldry and sweet in her concern for Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking. Vacratsis gives us a Porter straight out of the Coen Brothers universe, and is a welcome ray of light.
That being said, why would you cast heavy-hitters like Graham Abbey as Banquo or André Sills as Ross if you’re just going to smother them in “concept?” But I must say, I see you Emilio Vieira (Lennox), and I support every emotionally nuanced character you’ve created at the Festival thus far, and may you have many more shining opportunities to show your talents on its various stages.
If Lepage didn’t want us to take his concept literally he shouldn’t have rendered his show so completely lacking in the figurative. A biker gang is an emotionally chilly place to set a Shakespeare tragedy, as their petty squabbles can’t really be said to have international consequences. I’ll always thrill to a director completely overhauling a text and making you think you’re watching the story for the first time, but this Macbeth is misguided and undercooked. Rather than being complicit to acts of violent horror by the brainiac king and queen of fictional murderers, we are subject to an insular, hermetic, and clunky piece of theatre-tech that doesn’t justify its operating cost.
May Lepage arise refreshed from his rest.
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