Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh
Four stars
The battle looks far from won as audiences enter this epic staging of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. Walking through a battle-scarred landscape of burnt out cars and the debris of war, the sounds of jet planes and helicopters swoop overhead. Set designer Frankie Bradshaw’s evocative installation is quite a curtain raiser for what follows in the more formal interior where the show takes place.
There are the Witches for starters. The three young women who greet Ralph Fiennes’ camouflage clad Macbeth as he and Banquo are finishing their tour of duty appear like some New Age ragamuffin girl gang. As they promise Macbeth the world, the die is cast on the catastrophic power grab to come. Played by Lucy Mangan, Danielle Fiamanya and Lola Shalam, it is they who pull the strings here. In many ways in Simon Godwin’s production of Emily Burns’ adaptation, it is their play.
The royal clique the trio manipulate into self destruction are a back stabbing sociopathic establishment who would stamp each other into the ground if they thought they could take charge. Think Succession in a war zone. Macbeth and Indira Varma’s scheming Lady M are the worst of the lot. No wonder they lose the plot once Keith Fleming’s King Duncan is bumped off. At one point Macbeth paws his partner in crime, as if a suppressed and brutal machismo had been unleashed. Later, as Fiennes sits hunched in a chair with whisky in hand while he recounts Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow…’ speech, he invests the doomed king with a manic edge.
Presented by the Wessex Grove company and Edinburgh Fringe stalwarts Underbelly with a host of partners in association with the Washington DC based Shakespeare Theatre Company,this is a hugely ambitious production. By the end, with his co-conspirator dead and his court in ruins, Macbeth is in agony, lashing out through the pain before his inevitable demise. As a new regime is ushered in, the Witches pause for breath, biding their time before their next insurrection in a boldly realised affair.
The Herald, January 19th, 2024
ends
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