The great thing about canonical works is that you can do whatever the hell you want to them – rip them up, rearrange them, even mock them mercilessly – and they’ll survive intact for the next generation to endorse or butcher. So it is for Shakespeare’s vice-like tragedy Macbeth, which gets a kind of fleecing here by the UK playwright Zinnie Harris. It’s subtitled “An Undoing”, a play on Lady Macbeth’s “what’s done cannot be undone” line and a manifesto of sorts.
It opens promisingly, with Natasha Herbert as a character who could be one of the weird sisters or perhaps the porter at hell’s gate. She ushers in the play while warning us about audience expectations and the rigidity of role-play, establishing a meta-theatricality that will prove germane later on. Then she introduces the bloody soldier (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) and the play proper begins, cleaving for a while to Shakespeare’s contours while introducing some curious changes of its own.
Chief among these is an extended role for Lady Macduff (Jessica Clarke) – very much up the duff and secretly screwing Banquo (Rashidi Edward). She and Lady M (Bojana Novakovic) are depicted as sisters or cousins, depending on how well the relationship is going. Duncan (Jim Daly) is a doddery old fool, bringing Joe Biden briefly to mind, and Macduff (David Woods) is a kind of battering ram, stolid and stern. Macbeth (Johnny Carr) himself is most like the character Shakespeare conceived, at least initially.
Harris has a neat and devastating structure in mind. She winds the play and the audience up in the first act and lets everything unravel in the second (the set makes this literal, spinning clockwise for the first half and anti-clockwise thereafter). Where Shakespeare has Lady Macbeth go mad with unacknowledged guilt, this undoing places the burden of insanity on her husband. Macbeth is given the sleepwalking scene and his wife recites the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. It means much of the brutality and bloodlust is hers.
It would be an intriguing challenge to the play, a serious examination of gender and violence, if only Harris were able to mount a genuinely alternate vision. The playwright wants to free Lady Macbeth from the strictures of madness and suicide in which Shakespeare has imprisoned her but the replacement she offers up is glib and colourless. At one point she has the character come out into the audience and lecture us about the inadequacies of the role (seriously?!) but Harris’s Lady M is neither as nuanced nor as convincing.
Worse, and ultimately depressing, is the impact on Shakespeare’s poetry. Harris uses the original text but cuts speeches off just before they get interesting. She’s fond of cheap anachronisms. She also translates key phrases into “plain English” like a No Fear Shakespeare book, rendering them banal and reductive. For a work that relies so heavily on a strong knowledge of the original play, this is unforgivably patronising.
The director, Matthew Lutton, keeps things moving and introduces some arresting imagery but his actors lumber through the text and the mood is often leaden. Novakovic – presumably in an attempt to subvert assumptions about the part – delivers a Lady Macbeth who is all breezy self-confidence, with no grit or hunger. Carr is suitably haggard, bewildered and savage in a part stripped of its marrow, more comfortable with the blank verse than the heightened poetry. Gone is the grand expanse of his imagination – and most of the moral horror. Clarke, Edward and Herbert are generally excellent in support, and Daly and Woods make for some terrific dumb-show murderers.
Dann Barber’s design is enormously helpful, even if the set itself seems very similar to Shaun Gurton’s work on Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2010 Richard III, at least in its functionality. The revolving concrete grey spaces are both deadening and endlessly revealing, like live-action dioramas increasingly surreal and barbaric. Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting is wonderfully spooky and Jethro Woodward’s sound is faintly ominous, like distant thunder. It’s the kind of design that would work perfectly well on a traditional Macbeth.
Playing with Shakespeare is fun and sometimes illuminating: Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest, with Helen Mirren playing Prospera – a female Prospero – brought out a fascinating tenderness in the role; a National Theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream interchanged Oberon and Titania’s war games to mixed, but occasionally hilarious, effect; Tom Stoppard dazzled with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Harris mounts an intriguing war of attrition on Shakespeare’s play, an attempt to expose it in some telling way, but she doesn’t bother building her own vision as compensation or counter-argument. She undoes, then brings the curtain down.
Ah well, we’ll always have Macbeth.
Macbeth (An Undoing) is at Merlyn Theatre, the Malthouse until 28 July
