Toil, Trouble & Trophy Wife

Theater | Review of: Macbeth, and Crimes of the Heart

By ERIC GRODE
February 15, 2008

The milk of human kindness, always a rare commodity in Shakespeare's spare but unsparing "Macbeth," is nowhere to be found in the scorched-earth production on grisly display at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Set amid the depravity of Stalinist Russia and firmly anchored by a wrathful Patrick Stewart, director Rupert Goold's daring and diabolical mounting turns all of Scotland into a virtual abattoir, peopled with little more than a pile of corpses that an ever-dwindling coterie of survivors must climb over on the way to a gore-slicked crown.

For most of the play, this crown sits none too comfortably on the head of Macbeth, who reluctantly kills the king, Duncan, to attain it and then almost cavalierly slaughters many, many others to hold on to it. Mr. Stewart, who first came to BAM in Peter Brook's legendary 1971 "Midsummer Night's Dream," is at his most versatile during that brief spell before his ascent. Haunted by the knowledge that his branch of the royal family tree is a barren one — he has no children — Mr. Stewart's Macbeth is unable to receive even good news without casting a pained look at men like Banquo (Martin Turner), whose sons are destined to succeed Macbeth. When Macbeth begins hacking at anyone who poses a real or imagined threat, Messrs. Stewart and Goold make it clear that he is also hacking futilely at the enveloping tendrils of time.

That sense of growing "aweary of the sun," as Macbeth describes it late in his reign, is undoubtedly exacerbated by his age. Not many actors take on this virile warrior more than a decade after playing the senescent Prospero of "The Tempest," as the 67-year-old Mr. Stewart has, and Mr. Goold's production — which began at England's Chichester Festival Theatre before moving to the West End — unobtrusively acknowledges this fact. This Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood) appears to be a bit of a trophy wife, and her husband's frequent physical attentions have the whiff of autumnal desperation to them. And his sudden rise to power, abetted by the three witches whom Mr. Goold has outfitted as sinister military nurses, takes on an added tinge of pathos; this is a man who presumably had made peace at some point with the idea of rising no further. When the floodgates of "vaulting ambition" do finally burst, the homicidal flood is all the stronger for having been banked so long.

In accordance with Macbeth's observation that "Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain'd sleep," Mr. Goold has moved virtually the entire play out of the light and into what appears to be a basement kitchen. Anthony Ward's dank, white-tiled set, aided by Howard Harrison's sepulchral lighting, resembles the grisly washroom from the movie "Saw" more than any royal furnishings, and Mr. Goold has filled this unforgiving space with brutal interrogations, a geyser of blood from a rusty faucet, and the casual slaughter of men, women, and children. Boisterous video projections by Lorna Heavey tip into kitsch now and then, and having the "weird sisters" rap their incantations over an electronic beat was perhaps an unfortunate choice, but the overall effect is appropriately eerie and unrelentingly bleak.

Bleak, perhaps, but not brisk. "Macbeth" is the shortest and tightest of all Shakespeare's plays, although you wouldn't know it from this three-hour production. One bit of padding is chillingly effective: The bloody appearance of Banquo's ghost is staged twice, the second time through the eyes of the dinner guests as they attempt to ignore Macbeth's paranoid ravings. But the sobering Act IV scene in which the exiled future leaders Macduff (Michael Feast) and Malcolm (Scott Handy) confront their own failings largely fizzles. The marked exception is the superb Mr. Feast's almost unbearably protracted silence as he receives some particularly bad news late in the scene, but the momentum flags after that as the warring armies converge.

Mr. Goold moves his king and queen through the crowds masterfully; I particularly liked the bit of foreshadowing where Lady Macbeth interrupts her kitchen preparation and gives her hands a quick wash before greeting the doomed Duncan. But he also allows Mr. Stewart and Ms. Fleetwood to lapse into declamatory shouting during some of their soliloquies. (Ms. Fleetwood's "Unsex me" speech is the most flagrant, but by no means the only, example.) Again, Mr. Stewart's earlier work — including an almost jovial "Is this a dagger which I see before me" soliloquy that slowly slips into raw terror — outshines the thundering arias of paranoia and anxiety that follow. But even in this occasionally overstuffed form, his long-awaited return to BAM after 37 years is the stuff of several midwinter nights' nightmares.

* * *

Shakespeare's three weird sisters have some unexpected competition in Lenny, Meg, and Babe Magrath, the squabbling trio at the center of "Crimes of the Heart," which is receiving a somber and rather tone-deaf revival by the Roundabout Theatre. Toil and trouble abound in Beth Henley's 1980 mishmash of weepy whimsy, one of the more debatable Pulitzer Prize winners in recent memory.

With its jokey dose of female solidarity grafted onto Southern Gothic shenanigans (a horse struck by lightning, a mom who hanged herself and the family cat), "Crimes" requires foolproof comic timing and a completely plausible trio in the lead roles if it is to have any chance of succeeding. Director Kathleen Turner has provided neither.

Jennifer Dundas (as the spinsterish Lenny), Sarah Paulson (adopting a surprisingly brittle façade as the loose Meg), and Lily Rabe (as the childlike Babe, who just shot her no-good husband) are among this generation's more resourceful stage actresses, but only Ms. Paulson gives anything close to a fully rounded performance here. And despite a stronger-than-usual physical resemblance among the three, at no point do they blend plausibly as siblings. (Or rather, in light of the bizarrely inconsistent Mississippi accents, at no point do they blaynd, blehhhnd, or blayyund.)

Most unforgivable is Ms. Turner's inability to find the play's often superficial but nonetheless agreeable humor. The action drags and lurches at a tempo better suited to Chekhov's three sisters than Ms. Henley's, and it's hard to remember a more slackly paced two and a half hours in recent memory. The evening is not a total loss, however: Ms. Turner's inimitable voice is responsible for the pre-show reminder to turn off any cell phones. Thank heaven for small favors.

"Macbeth" until March 22 (651 Fulton St., between Ashland and Rockwell places, 718-636-4100).

"Crimes of the Heart" until April 13 (111 W. 46th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-719-1300).

Toil, Trouble & Trophy Wife

Theater | Review of: Macbeth, and Crimes of the Heart

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