Macbeth.

‘Is this a Dud which  I see before me?’ was the Telegraph’s review headline for the National Theatre’s Macbeth.  Other reviewers have been fairly unanimous in slagging this production off. But I went last night to the South Bank on a lovely sunny London evening with my friend Kathy and we loved this Macbeth with Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff, in a setting which is described in the programme as ‘now, after a civil war’.

It is very good to be foreign sometimes. It means, for instance, that one can have opinions about Shakespeare that one is not allowed to have as a English person.  Reviewers of Shakespeare plays can do nothing but either laud or criticize the quality of the productions: the sets, performances etc. No one would ever dare questioning anything in the bard’s work itself.  But being a foreigner  I can venture where others may not go and say, for instance, that I think the Tempest could do with a fair bit of editing, such as cutting out most of those boatswains who bore for Britain as far as I am concerned.  

The National Theatre’s programme for Macbeth does not have a synopsis of the play, presumably feeling it would be insulting to the audience to insinuate that everyone doesn’t  know the play by heart. I have read the play in the past, but have never seen it . I read it again yesterday before going to the National Theatre and while loving it, I couldn't help wondering  whether  Lady Macbeths’ wholesale embracing of evil from the very start is really plausible?  Evil is normally a slow descent with some development. She starts as a full blown monster and then disintegrates rather than the other way around.  Should she  not at least try and justify her cruelty somehow? Even the worst criminals try and hide behind a justification for  their crime: ‘This position should be mine by right, so I will make it mine’ or something similar. But Lady Macbeth has absolutely no qualms and is devoid of all remnants of morality. Maybe she must be seen as a clinical psychopath?

The  set is very good and gives a sense of evil and impending doom:  uniformly black and grey with concrete slabs and  a central moving ramp dotted with high stakes which lumber ominously:  sometimes evocative of  giant burned down candles, sometimes of stakes for beheadings , and sometimes trees  on which the witches sit, climbed high  like giant ravens.  The only  drawback of a wonderful production was that they had chosen to cut out the whole of the fabulous  ‘Double Double toil and trouble ‘ speech. Why? We could only assume that is was because of the ‘Liver of blaspheming Jew ‘ part seeming anti-semitic? But if so that would be nonsense. The active ingredient for the cauldron’s brew  is the ‘blaspheming’ part, not the ‘Jew’, just like a few lines further on it is the 'birth-strangled' part, rather than the 'babe'...