It’s good to know that once the bombs have dropped and civilization as we know it has crumbled, the Bard will still live among the rubble. While the idea to stage Macbeth in a post-apocalyptic future hits all of my cool buttons, no amount of crowbar-wielding soldiers could make up for the production’s basic shortcomings.
Of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth is one of the most bloody and gruesome. The Grandel Theatre’s stage strongly represents this with sets of urban primal: a chain-link fence silhouetting a blood-red sky, a rusty castle interior, and in the center of the stage, a half-submerged barrel with ominous streaks of red paint on the floor, as if a beaten and bloody corpse had been dragged across the stage.
The production kicks off in a rage of electric guitars as the actors battle in a royal rumble using crowbars, baseball bats, machetes and chains. The men and women of this world are decked out in tank-tops and urban combat gear, including elbow pads, kneepads, and the occasional helmet and catcher’s chest protector. The younger actors sport punked-out hair styles, dyed in unnatural greens, blues and pinks.
One of the wowie-kazowie elements of the production is the use of two large projections screens that help serve a live feed to the battlefield at the outset of the play. Unfortunately, they are also used to project Macbeth’s visions and hallucinations, including his taunting knife and the ghost of a murdered Banquo at the banquet. Rather than let the actor create the visions for his audience, technology creates them for us. And then, of course, when the production asks us to use our imaginations with the slayings of King Duncan and Macbeth (both occur off-stage), both are something I want to see presented on stage. I feel especially cheated about Macbeth’s death scene, because the play lacks the closure of the villain’s comeuppance.
What really bogs down this play are the casting choices of key players. When I think “tragic hero” in the Shakepearean realm, I expect someone with a presence that fills the entire room. When Macbeth walks onstage for the first time with Banquo, it takes a good few minutes to figure out who’s who. John O’Hearn’s Macbeth strikes me as a tragic hero whose only tragedy is that he got beat up for his lunch money in the Scottish third grade. He does not have the ability to command the booming attention that this role deserves. Mr. O’Hearn also has a way of delivering his lines with a briskness that sacrifices clarity. I strained my ears to pull apart the words from a verbal mush.
Donna Northcott as Lady Macbeth, while giving a decent performance, does not visually fit with the rest of the world that fills the stage. While most of the characters in this production look like they just stepped out of Mad Max, Lady Macbeth looks like she just went on a shopping spree at Lord and Taylor.
The standout performance in this production is Matt Kahler as the tall, deep-voiced, bleached-blond Macduff. Mr. Kahler’s performance is layered and intense, and when Macduff delivers the fatal blow to Macbeth, he ably treats the moment as a bittersweet victory.
This bombed out, futuristic Macbeth is an intriguing concept. It’s a shame that some of the production’s fundamentals are still stuck in the fallout.

Popularity: 1% [?]

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2001 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.