Macbeth performed by the Manchester International Festival (St Peter’s Church) (review)

I had wanted to see Kenneth Branagh play Macbeth on stage for years, possibly even before the idea came to him. My pleasure that my wish had been granted subsided when I learnt that a small number of performances, at a seating capacity of 260, were to be given in a deconsecrated church in Manchester; I live in London. I anticipated that all tickets would be sold within minutes; they were. Hopes rose again when I discovered the final performance would be relayed to cinemas courtesy of NT Live. Buying a ticket and getting to the venue is an integral part of the “audience experience.” Securing a ticket at the Odeon, Covent Garden was stress free, with no “online booking opens at 8 a.m. to members” messages followed by the system crashes and hours of anxious button pressing that now often accompany theater booking.

The brand “NT Live” promotes an expectation of the special occasion and exclusivity (not all productions secure “encore” screenings, and none to date have been marketed on DVD), but strangely I felt no excitement at the immediacy of the show’s being relayed “live”; an encore would have satisfied me just as well. Even the live feed of Emma Freud’s enthusiastic introduction and an interview with the co-director, Rob Ashford, before the show failed to incite the same level of anticipation I enjoy waiting for an actor to speak their first line or the curtain to rise. Ms Freud’s importuning the cinema audience into wonderment at the spectacle we were about to share (and, we were told, would certainly enjoy) was unnecessary. I didn’t need the pre-show chat and validation of my decision to be present; I had already bought my ticket and sat down.

Stage and screen speak different visual languages and I was curious to know how I would react. What would I be seeing: a movie, a play viewed through a reflective screen, a straightforward filming of the production for the historical record? This was my first experience of watching a stage play relayed in a cinema and I was suspicious. As the performance began, my theatrical instincts kicked in ahead of the expectations of the film-goer; I was conscious that I was powerless to influence the actors’ performances—the unease, the quality of silence, the attention, the fear, the laughter (admittedly limited in Macbeth) experienced by the cinema audience had no part to play in shaping the performance I was seeing. The emotional and physical relationship between audience and players was not there; the actors were not performing for me.

Filming for NT Live is a complex procedure and there are rehearsals, chiefly to ensure the correct positioning of the cameras and sound levels but also to tone down make-up, adjust wayward wigs and so on. What a theatrical audience will readily accept, or not notice, can become a distraction when seen on a 20ft screen. I wondered whether Ray Fearon’s melodramatic performance as Macduff would have moved me more and battered me less in the theater. Although the crew insists that it is there to film, not shape, a performance, adjustments for the camera of voice and gesture by the actors would seem inevitable. The National Theatre records all its productions in its theaters on fixed cameras, and these recordings are archived alongside the live relay performances. Macbethwas not an NT...