Macbeth

Tramway, Glasgow

4 stars
While setting Shakespeare in a psychiatric ward isn’t a new idea, 
neither is it uncommon for real life patients in such institutions to 
construct such elaborate self-destructive fantasies with themselves at 
their fragile world’s centre. Both concepts rub up against each other 
in the National Theatre of Scotland’s boldly audacious reimagining of 
the Scottish play, which sees Alan Cumming act out the entire play 
alone onstage for an hour and three-quarters. Flying without a safety 
net, Cumming opens himself up physically, mentally and emotionally in a 
performance of fearless bravura.

It starts with Cumming’s character being sectioned and stripped of his 
twenty-first century apparel by two nurses played almost wordlessly by 
Myra McFadyen and Aly Craig. With fresh scars embedded into his chest, 
as Cumming calls to what are both captors and protectors with the 
Witches ‘When shall we three meet again?’ line, there are hints of a 
domestic massacre and a possible failed suicide attempt to have caused 
his incarceration.

Watched over from all angles by a trio of CCTV cameras, Cumming pads 
about Merle Hensel’s towering brick-lined set in search of healing his 
fragmented self, but finds only a succession of voices tearing him 
apart. In the bath-tub he lays splayed and naked as he recounts Lady 
M’s ‘unsex me’ speech. A wheelchair becomes a pukka King Duncan’s 
mobile throne which Cumming’s own Macbeth-possessed psyche lays 
troubled claim to. Most significant of all, a doll is battered into 
submission and a child’s jumper pressed down heavily into the 
bath-water.

John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg’s production reimagines Shakespeare as 
a cycle of self-laceration where often the silent moments are the most 
significant. With Cumming at its centre, the heady tangle of strength 
and vulnerability he presents us with makes for a brilliantly troubling 
play for twisted times.

The Herald, June 16th 2012

ends