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Reviewed by:
  • Macbeth
  • Jonathan Ivy Kidd
Macbeth. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Rupert Goold. The Chichester Festival Theatre Production, Lyceum Theatre, New York City. 12 April 2008.

The Chichester Festival Theatre Production of Macbeth opened within the confines of a dingy white-tiled hospital operating room that could just as easily be the electroshock chamber of an insane asylum. The Three Witches, posing as nurses, offered a tantalizing entrance into this revival of betrayal, murder, and desire. After Sergeant provided Duncan with information from the battlefront, Duncan commended him and left him in the capable hands of the nurses who injected Sergeant with an unknown serum and watched him convulse, then die on a gurney. Whether this act of euthanasia was a moment of mercy for a dying man, or mercilessness for a soldier deemed no longer useful, set the stage for Macbeth. Rather than simply anesthetize the audience with overt gore and phantasmagoric spectacle, Macbeth worked to expose the moral failures of modernity’s marriage between body and technology. Through design and themes focused on Futurist totalitarianism; the presentation of mundane corporeal habits, particularly via the use of food on stage; ensemble acting (even with a star turn); and the depiction of witches steeped in technology and abjection, Rupert Goold’s production served as a solid meditation on postmodern melancholy.

Set in Stalinist Russia, this Macbeth featured Lorna Heavey’s stark video and projection design—including images of rapidly advancing tanks, soldiers marching in military parades, and fanatical crowds assembled at compulsory political rallies—that all pointed to a Futurist motif centered upon speed, technology, and violence. Macbeth critiques the dangers of using aesthetics to express political ideology without reducing itself to a reactive form of preachy political art. Goold’s nod toward the perils of totalitarianism was best expressed by depicting Ross as a technocrat who got caught up in the fray of warring parties and was forced to choose a side. We saw three dimensions of Ross in a span of a few moments—his torture and self-preserving confession about the nature of Macduff’s escape and Lady Macduff’s location, his doomed attempt to warn Lady Macduff and her children of their impending demise, and his guilt-ridden admission to Macduff that Macbeth had murdered Macduff’s family. Ross’s folly, as the government middle manager who believed he was above the messy consequences of empire-building only to find his own rights violated and himself naming names, provided a precise commentary upon current debates on the use of torture and the curtailing of civil liberties amid the global war on terror.

Despite the appeal of broad political themes, Goold’s choice to have the actors consume food onstage provided a more exacting reflection of the human condition. While this decision led to several moments when the audience found humor in the fact that an actor paused on a line because he/she had a mouth full of food or drink, the overall effect proved quite chilling despite its subtlety. When Duncan named Malcolm the Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth looked down at his half-finished beer as if it had been spiked before gulping it down and speaking his aside with an alcohol-induced bravado. Thereafter, Lady Macbeth exposed the hideousness behind the biblical taboo of inhospitality when she pushed Macbeth to murder Duncan in their home while she decorated a raspberry torte and projected a veneer of Martha Stewart–like charm; in another [End Page 664] crucial moment, Macbeth orchestrated the assassination of Banquo while casually making a sandwich, and sealed his fate by breaking bread—and class hierarchy—with the hired murderers. The result of presenting foodstuffs within Macbeth was that it kept corporeal reality at the forefront of thought: food and drink offer life, yet they remind us that death is inevitable. Banquo’s present absence from the banquet, which Goold featured twice as bookends to the intermission, gained horrific verve due, not only to the use of the dining table as a postmortem fashion runway by Banquo’s bloody ghost, but also to the acknowledgment that Banquo’s death, like hunger and thirst, resulted from human need.


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