Every time I am exposed to Shakespeare, I am reminded of my limitations as a writer, and am deflated. Like a whoopee cushion, where my own little words are but fart noises when compared to sweet sound of Shakespearean verse. “We’re not worthy”, as Wayne and Garth would cry out, and the fact that I’m invoking Wayne’s World in a review of Shakespeare shows just how unworthy I am.
Because this *is* a review of Macbeth, albeit not the play but the Broadway production currently underway featuring Jean-Luc . . . er, Patrick Stewart in the title role. That the audience is in store for a violent and horrifying interpretation is apparent early on, from the gunshot that opens the play to the morgue-like set where, in Act I, Scene 2, a blood-soaked soldier renders his report from the battlefield. In most texts, after the soldier has spoken, King Duncan commands “get him surgeons”, and the stage directions indicate “Exit Sergeant, attended”. In this production, the King demands surgeons, but the soldier is euthanized by lethal injection after the King has departed.
Dark material, to be sure. And for the next three hours the blood flows so freely that one marvels that Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood, amazing performance) only got a small spot on her hands. Together with the spine-tingling but heavy-handed use of video imagery and ominous music and sound effects, it’s as if the producers were trying to make a horror film. When Malcolm and Macduff hunt Macbeth in Dunsinane, you almost expect one to say to the other, “maybe we’ll find him quicker if we split up!”
Indeed, by the end of the play my mind and senses had been so heavily assaulted that I completely missed the portrayal of Macbeth’s death that lies at the heart of the production. In the text, Macbeth meets his death at the hands of Macduff defiantly:
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn’d be him that first cries “Hold, enough!” [Exuent, fighting]
In this production, Macbeth’s final moments are transformed from defiance to surrender. He has Macduff at the brink of death during their single combat, but cannot bring himself to deliver the fatal blow, and in a moment of tragic realization gasps “Enough!” and lets himself be slain by Macduff.
And damn’d be him that first cries “Hold!” [fighting] Enough . . . ! [Macbeth is slain]
It is a provocative, if arguably unfaithful, twist which, if it works at all, works because of Stewart’s nuanced portrayal of Macbeth with tormented Hamlet-like sincerity – a man whose conscience cannot withstand what Coleridge called “the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will”. Nor is it Stewart alone who shines; strong performances are found throughout. As for the rest of the production, it is full of sound and fury.
Macbeth is playing at the Lyceum Theatre in New York through May 24. For some of Patrick Stewart's less serious, but no less brilliant work, check out the video below.