Macbeth
Minerva, Chichester
Betrayal
Donmar, London WC2
Philistines
Lyttlelton, London SE1
One of the most exciting current partnerships between actor and director can now be caught at Chichester. Rupert Goold, the young artistic director of Headlong Theatre, has directed Patrick Stewart, at the peak of his considerable powers as a Shakespearean actor, before, in an unforgettable arctic Tempest. The Macbeth they have created is even more explosive.
It's worth going just for the opening scene. A soldier gasps for breath on a hospital trolley; he's surrounded by walls of white, lavatory-style tiles and tended by silent, masked nurses. He gives news of the battle and Macbeth's bravery and fades away. As he does so, those ministering angels wheel round, to reveal themselves as heralds of death: these carers are witches, who will forever hover ambiguously around the action. 'To win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths'; this is the scariest of Shakespeare plays, in which woods have feet and ghosts are guests.
Goold's production doesn't stint on gore. Dead fowl are heaped up for a banquet; a tap runs red; great gouts of blood spread across the walls. The action takes place in what could be a butcher's shop, or a modernist kitchen, with a heavy industrial lift which slams down to allow frightful entrances, and weirdly whisks apparitions away to lower depths.
It doesn't stint on significance, either: a video screen flashes footage of military parades from the former Soviet Union. The carnage in the castle looks like the symptom of a nationwide disturbance. It also looks like the outward sign of psychological disorder. As Lady Macbeth, Kate Fleetwood is magnetic, sexually predatory, quick to action and as quickly dashed. Stewart, a martial presence and a mellifluous speaker, finds a strange croak in his voice as the action darkens; when he talks of the rooky wood, it's as if a raven is beating in his throat. Michael Feast's distinguished Macduff, hearing of his family's slaughter, lets fall a desolating long silence. Episode upon episode is fruitfully re-thought: the scene in which the dead Banquo appears to Macbeth is played twice, once as seen through his host's eyes, once through the eyes of the feasting guests. Every moment throws up something terrifying.
When Harold Pinter's Betrayal opened in 1978, it was greeted by reviewers as the equivalent of Bob Dylan's electric-guitar Judas moment. The dramatist of hinterland and chill had turned to an exploration of middle-class adultery. Betrayal indeed. Back then, the play's only note-worthy quality seemed to be formal innovation; the affair between a woman and her husband's best friend was unfolded in a reverse time-scheme, beginning with a scene between the ex-lovers, ending at the moment when they were about to get it on. Thirty years later, a different reversal - of expectation - galvanises the play. What is uncovered as the years roll back is the opposite of the predictable progression from innocence to experience. The revelation lies not in how little each character knew, but how much. Subtly, the title is unpicked; in a play marked by concealment, in which the woman tells her husband more than her lover, and the men (here's a toxic point, which no one seemed to find sinister in the Seventies) like each other better than they like her, who is betraying whom?
Roger Michell's production registers every beat of these clenched, charged conversations - about tablecloths and novels and drinks and holidays - without ever sounding ponderous. It has in Toby Stephens an actor who can switch from calculation to radiance, though he's a mite thespy (too much highlighting of his profile) for a literary agent. It has in Dervla Kirwan an alluring actress who seems to grow extra skins as both her men differently let her down. And it has in Samuel West the best actor of Pinter of his generation. The forensic precision which makes West an excellent verse speaker is matched here with a mostly suppressed but sometimes overspilling bitterness. In each of his modes - a corduroyed codger, a young man meeting disappointment under a ridiculous party hat - he is withheld, apparently benign. Yet his carefully clamped-down mouth and narrowed eyes begin to leak misery. As he both learns and hides more, his control becomes kind of spite and power; his geniality is as threatening as the customary Pinter menace.
Maxim Gorky's plays have long been patronised as merely interesting footnotes to the dramas of his contemporary Chekhov. Both paint individuals against vast spaces, but Gorky's effects are heavier, more overtly political; his dramas are structurally more baggy and emotionally less wayward. Yet these limitations can be assets; he provides, as a more exquisite dramatist can't, a sense of journalistic chronicle, total sharp-eyed accuracy.
Howard Davies's enthralling production of Philistines, first seen in 1902, catches perfectly the tumbling rhythm of everyday life, showing a household fracturing as the world outside disintegrates. It's rare to see a stage so realistically bursting with simultaneous separate activities, overlapping and interrupting each other. While Phil Davis's terrier-like bully of a patriarch yaps away, his educated-out-of-their-class children yawn on the sofa; meanwhile, the maid, in what becomes a running gag, heaves a samovar the size of an obese toddler on to the family table. While the lodging lothario proposes to one girl, another weeps in the corner; as Neil Austin's lighting flushes with rosy expectancy, hope dies.
The modernity of some characters, such as Justine Mitchell's lithe, inauthentic and yet truly boho siren, is startling; Andrew Upton's attempts to register this in his mostly new version sometimes overstep the mark. But Davies goes beyond the impressive journalistic Gorky to show a deep-rooted, all-engulfing melancholy, finely projected in three outstanding performances. Rory Kinnear's student rebel may look as if, after years of being stuck and stymied, he's escaping, but his family temperament will doom him. The sooth sayer of the company is Conleth Hill, who's dishevelling and bleary-eyed. Ruth Wilson, the terminally depressed daughter of the house, presses herself blankly against the rainy windows of Bunny Christie's dark, effective set, as the riot erupts outside.
No wonder the playwright re invented himself, changing his name from Peshkov; Gorky is Russian for 'bitter'.
