There's a note that
Keith Fleming wrote on the top of his script for Macbeth, in which he
plays the title role in a new production of Shakespeare's Scottish
play which opens in Perth this week before visiting The Tron in
Glasgow. 'Human nature, baby,' the note reads. 'Grab it and growl!'
This is a quote
attributable to Jack Torrance, the manic anti-hero of Stephen King's
horror novel, The Shining, brought to the big-screen by Stanley
Kubrick in 1980 with Jack Nicholson as alcoholic writer Torrance.
This says much about Fleming's approach to playing Macbeth, because,
while Rachel O'Riordan's production looks set to remain faithfully
concept-free to the bard's words, in terms of pinning down his
character, Fleming is as steeped in pop culture as it gets. It's the
wilder characters in particular he leans to, icons full of wounded
machismo and a dark underbelly beneath the bluster.
“He's a bit Tony
Soprano,” Fleming says of Macbeth, “a bit Malcolm Tucker, a bit
Jack Torrance, a bit Walter White from Breaking Bad. He's a warrior.
He's a good man, but as the play goes on there's a rage inside him.
He has to adopt many different personas throughout the play. He's
always been looking outwardly, but by the end of the play he has to
look inside himself to see who he is. He's looked outwardly too much,
and he has this realisation that once deals are done, they can't be
undone, with all the stresses that brings, and what it does to your
mind.
“We're focusing on
the deconstruction of a macho man,” Fleming explains. “A lot of
productions focus on Lady Macbeth as this evil force behind Macbeth,
but we're not approaching it that way. We're also looking at the fact
that at the time the play is set, people did believe in witches, and
that witches could bring down a king, so that belief in the
supernatural world is very prominent.
“Something that's
quite often left out of Macbeth as well is the politics of the play.
Duncan is often painted as this nice old man, but he controls
Macbeth, and publicly snubs him by not offering him next in line, but
keeping him close anyway. It's a very Good Fellas thing.”
At the time of talking,
Fleming and the rest of director Rachel O'Riordan's cast have just
run the second half of the play in full after doing the same with the
first act the day before. This has allowed Fleming to join up
Macbeth's psychological dots.
“I don't want to play
it all on one note, with Macbeth as this macho guy,” Fleming
affirms. “He's a guy who's done some things, and he then has to
live with the consequences of that. He's been busy upsetting the
universal order of things, but he didn't think of what the
consequences might be, which then becomes a mental and psychological
curse.”
Fleming isn't being
melodramatic here. As part of his research, Fleming met with a
psychiatrist, who read Shakespeare's play.
“He pointed out how
much Shakespeare seemed to understand about human behaviour,”
Fleming observes, “and how he recognised disorders that hadn't been
defined yet, and how amazing that was. It's not just the guilt of
murdering Banquo with Macbeth. It affects the brain at every level,
so it's been interesting in that way, because it's something you have
to immerse yourself in totally.”
This isn't anything new
for Fleming. It was the same when he played the young Peer Gynt in
Dominic Hill's epic Dundee Rep production of Colin Teevan's
potty-mouthed contemporary take on Henrik Ibsen's rollicking saga of
one man's getting of wisdom. It was the same too when Fleming took
the lead in Barflies, site-specific auteurs Grid Iron's close-up
compendium of some of Charles Bukowski's booze-soaked short stories.
Fleming played Bukowski's alter-ego, Henry Chinaski in the production
performed in Edinburgh's Barony Bar.
“I used to get loads
of comic parts years ago,” Fleming says, then when I did [Ursula
Rani Sarma's play, set in the aftermath of a bus crash] The Dark
Things at the Traverse with Dominic, I didn't look back. People say
dark parts are more fun to play, so maybe I'm just the prince of
darkness, like Jack Torrance.”
Fleming grew up in
Edinburgh, where he attended the Royal High School. Despite his
obsessive predilection for drawing and painting pictures of animals,
which he sent to assorted wildlife charities, a teacher told him he
would make a good Richard 11. This and the fact that he was going out
with a girl who went to stage school saw Fleming cast in a school
production of The Pirates of Penzance. This would have meant he would
have had to give up his job in a local restaurant, and he pulled out
of the production.
Fleming went to Chelsea
College of Art and Design for a year, before switching to studying
drama at Guildhall. After graduating Fleming stayed in London for
three years, toured a show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and later
to Perth, of all places. It was here he was spotted by then Dundee
Rep artistic director Hamish Glen, who asked him to join the
theatre's recently set-up ensemble company for six months. He stayed
for seven years.
“I worked out I did
over 2000 performances,” Fleming says. “There was a security
there and a chance to develop and do parts I wouldn't normally be
cast in. There was very much a family atmosphere. Dundee will always
be a huge part of my heart, but there came the time that it was time
to go.”
One of the last things
Fleming did in Dundee was Peer Gynt, which scooped him and Gerry
Mulgrew, who played the older Peer, the Critics award for Theatre in
Scotland's Best Actor award.
“It's probably the
piece of work I'm most proud of,” Fleming says. “It was a huge
venture, and one of the shining lights of Dominic's genius and
creativity. Barflies was another big proud moment. Again, that was
quite immersive. A few weeks after doing Peer Gynt, someone said they
saw me in a bar, and that they could see in my eyes that the darkness
hadn't left me.”
If such lingering
demons maybe accounted for being cast in shows with Theatre Jezebel
like the equally drink-sodden Days of Wine and Roses, Fleming has
also done tours of duty with the National Theatre of Scotland in
Black Watch and Beautiful Burnout. For now, though, Fleming is
immersed in becoming Macbeth, and is likely to remain so for some
time.
“I think it's going
to be a very true interpretation of the story, with no gimmicks,”
he says. “It's quite gritty, in that it recognises you need to go
low to get yourself high. It's quite rock and roll.”
Like the man said,
human nature, baby. Grab it and growl.
Macbeth, Perth Theatre,
September 18th-October 5th; Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 8th-19th
ends
Macbeth in Scotland
There have been
numerous productions of Macbeth in Scotland.
Gerard Murphy –
Murphy played Macbeth twice at the Citizens Theatre. The first was
noticeably opposite David Hayman, who played Lady Macbeth, while
Murphy returned for a second crack at the play in the mid 1990s.
Iain Glen – Before
Michael Boyd took over the RSC, he directed a young Iain Glen as
Macbeth at the Tron Theatre in a production that formed part of
Glasgow's Mayfest festival.
Danny Sapani – Sapani
played an Idi Amin-like dictator in Max Stafford-Clark's The Last
King of Scotland-inspired take on Macbeth produced by
Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company. Voodoo and tribal warfare
abounded in the production, which toured to the Underbelly in
Edinburgh as part of the Traverse Theatre's programme.
Liam Brennan – Brennan made for an understated and vulnerable Macbeth in an otherwise dull and lacklustre production of the play at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre.
Cezary Kosinski – Polish wunderkind Grzegorz Jarzyna brought Macbeth: 2008, his noisy contemporary dress take on Shakespeare's play, to Edinburgh International Festival, setting the action in a concrete bunker in an action-packed interpretation that resembled a big-screen blockbuster.
Alan Cumming –
Cumming joined forces with the National Theatre of Scotland for an
audacious solo version of the play, which found Macbeth sectioned in
a psychiatric hospital, believing himself to be king.
The Herald, September 17th 2013
ends
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