Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Gets a New Spin Courtesy of a British Playwright and Director, Zinnie Harris

Have you ever paused to consider that those intimidating women in “Macbeth” — the title character’s scheming wife, the witches who foretell his fate — might be products of a culture bent on turning them into monsters, and then setting them against each other? That would appear to be the premise behind “Macbeth (an undoing),” the latest offering from Zinnie Harris, the British playwright and director whose previous credits include revisionist takes on classics from “The Oresteia” to “Miss Julie.” Her new spin on “Macbeth,” which had its premiere at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre and arrives at New York following a London run, begins with a feisty monologue; it’s delivered by a character named Carlin, who emerges as the lead witch, and will later hide in plain sight as Lady Macbeth’s servant.Played by a zesty Liz Kettle, with a Scottish accent as thick as haggis, Carlin immediately knocks down the fourth wall, calling out the audience for simply showing up. “Death is what you want — blood, despair, the fall of man?” she asks, rhetorically. “Of course we’re here to do the play,” she adds, as if to reassure the crowd, though anyone expecting this famously gory tale to be told without a few sharp twists is in for a surprise.For starters, Shakespeare’s weird sisters play a more prominent role here — Carlin in particular, who also addresses the audience following the intermission, in a somewhat more jocular mood. It is disclosed that she and her two cohorts have their own fraught history with Lady Macbeth, who is portrayed by a witty and commanding Nicole Cooper; at one point, the four meet in a café, where Scotland’s new queen threatens to have the others burned. Lady Macduff also figures more heavily into the action; she is presented here as Lady Macbeth’s sister, or cousin; the apparent relatives can’t seem to decide which. Played by Emmanuella Cole, who doubles as one of the witches, she has both a posh English accent and a mischievous spirit; she is also heavily pregnant, and it is implied, not subtly, that Macbeth’s betrayed ally Banquo (a dapper but duly credulous James Robinson) is the father. Much attention is paid to Lady Macbeth’s own childlessness, which Ms. Harris suggests is a source of longing and regret. The character’s famous declaration that she has nursed a baby and would be willing to violently kill another while in that process is retained, but here it is specifically noted that the Macbeths have lost several children — a point that Lady Macduff rubs in her sister/cousin’s face after realizing the latter’s bloodthirsty ambitions.Those ambitions are hardly justified by the playwright: If anything, Ms. Harris’s Lady Macbeth comes across as more calculating and less prone to remorse, at least initially, than the original character. In this adaptation, it is her husband — a bit of a blowhard, but vulnerable, with both qualities underlined in Adam Best’s nuanced performance — who wanders about trying to wash imagined blood off his hands, while his wife takes over affairs of state.When the Lady Macbeth of “an undoing” eventually begins her own descent into madness, the men surrounding her, who can no longer recognize her as a woman in this capacity, are clearly complicit. They also speculate, as Macbeth tells it, that she herself is a witch, and yet when she asks the weird sisters, whom she refuses to see as supernatural creatures, why they continue to torment her, Carlin responds, “Because you always got us wrong.”Carlin is not entirely without mercy, in the end. She also proposes to Lady Macbeth, in the series of winding scenes that finally conclude the play, that perhaps they will meet again, “in a place where we talk about women helping each other. Of seeing each other as we are.”If Ms. Harris is trying to argue that powerful women are misunderstood, the cruelty her female characters show toward each other would seem to constitute a curious strategy. And if that behavior is supposed to be engendered or aggravated by patriarchal oppression, it’s hard to imagine the bumbling male characters we meet in this production — from Marc Mackinnon’s oafish King Duncan to Star Penders’s hyper-juvenile, comically witless Malcolm to Taqi Nazeer’s obsequious Lennox — keeping anyone down, other than themselves.“Macbeth (an undoing)” nonetheless sustains a bleak charm, with Tom Piper’s stark set and Alex Berry’s evocative costumes adding visual appeal. “If you’re looking for pyrotechnics, you’ll be disappointed,” Carlin warns us early on; while that’s true both literally and figuratively, Ms. Harris and her actors and design team manage to provide a stylish and engaging experience.

Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Gets a New Spin Courtesy of a British Playwright and Director, Zinnie Harris

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