Unable to match the star power of forthcoming versions of Shakespeare’s murderous Scottish thane from David Tennant and Ralph Fiennes, the Globe has opted for a staging that is young, condensed, and funnier than usual for its own take – though the latter innovation is not always a good thing.
The central idea of Abigail Graham’s production, of a competitively youthful society where children are always present, is a shrewd and solid one, marred by an excess of concepts and performances that fail to connect.
Max Bennett’s Macbeth appears strong and martial in his battle fatigues and body armour, but decanted into a Sunak-slim dinner suit he looks like an Apprentice contestant or an estate agent eager for one big sale. His immaculate hair, springy strut and too-quick grin can’t disguise an awareness of his own inadequacy.
His emotions are easily swayed by his wife (Matti Houghton, somewhat strident as Lady Macbeth) or by supernatural forces. Some of his lines – “’twas a rough night”, “thanks for that” – come across like locker-room asides and raise titters. Like his character, Bennett lacks depth. He reels off “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” as if he’s learned it for a party.
It’s made clear early on that the Macbeths have lost a child, while their contemporaries – and even the older Queen Duncan and the English Lord Siward – have precocious heirs at their side. Various minor characters are folded into the roles of Aaron Anthony’s forceful Macduff and his pregnant wife so they, and a young son dressed as Spider-Man, are enmeshed in the story from the start.
This isn’t the most radical of Graham’s edits, though. Three men in hazmat suits and grotesque masks play the witches, the murderers hired by Macbeth and all the members of his household, including the traditionally female ones. Usually the Globe deploys gender-blind casting to correct rather than exacerbate a historic imbalance.
While this trebling-up adds to the sense of a suffocatingly enclosed world it also causes confusion. Are the witches outside society or manipulating it from within? Are they real? The tone is uneven too.
The murders are horrific but the cauldron scene is played for gruesome laughs. Houghton’s wrenching depiction of Lady Macbeth’s madness is bracketed by two comic caricatures. All the wrong bits of the infamously unfunny Porter’s speech are rewritten. The child actors, however, are great.
Ultimately, I believed far more in Macbeth’s rivalry with Macduff and Fode Simbo’s muted Banquo than I did in his ruthlessness, his guilt or his marriage. And I kept getting distracted. Corpses are slowly and repeatedly trundled past the protagonists on morgue trolleys. A discordantly moaning black-clad chorus appears and disappears. Macbeth is dressed like King Charles at his coronation, with a hilariously outsized crown.
Ti Green’s set is dominated by an inverted tree with bare, silver-painted branches. Reminiscent of stags’ antlers, it represents an assault on nature and the disruption of the established order, and it nods to well-known references in the text. Fair enough. But why is the stage wrapped in creased, grey material?
I really wanted to like this Macbeth more. Oh well: there’ll be another one along in a minute.
