Few Macbeths have been more keenly awaited than that of Simon Russell Beale. How would one of our most thoughtful actors cope with Shakespeare's murderous thane? The short answer is that he draws the role into him and offers us a uniquely meditative, introspective and troubled Macbeth. It's a stunning performance: I just wish the overall pace weren't quite so slow.
The fashion these days is for swift, interval-free productions that preserve the play's hurtling narrative arc. John Caird's version certainly bucks the trend by running three hours, taking a late break after the murder of Lady Macduff and by playing everything with temperate quietness. But, while this avoids Saturday-night melodrama and quarries the text's endless riches, it sometimes gives the weird impression that all the action is a slow-motion dream taking place inside Macbeth's head.
The great gain is that Russell Beale excavates the text with the scrupulous attention of an archaeologist. You sense from the start this is going to be no ordinary Macbeth when Russell Beale first appears and sits pensively cleansing his sword while the Witches pronounce their incantations. He is less, you feel, "Bellona's bridegroom" than a scholar-soldier who would have gone to war with a book of verse in his pocket.
But what Russell Beale brings out superbly is Macbeth's ironic self-awareness and Freudian obsession with his own childlessness. He approaches murder with caution even pausing hesitantly on his first, shocked use of the word.
And when he compares pity to "a naked, new-born babe" he revolves slowly as if absorbing the painful audacity of the image. This is a Macbeth driven to murder less by vaulting ambition than by wifely injunction and by some strange inner need to prove his virility.
No actor I've seen has played Macbeth quite like this: as a haunted, introspective figure ill at ease in the world of action. And Russell Beale mines every last syllable of the text for hidden meaning. When asked if Duncan is stirring, he replies "Not yet" as if to imply that his spirit is likely to appear any minute. And, in the banquet scene, Russell Beale almost seems to summoning up Banquo's ghost as if assert his own capacity for defiance.
But the end is the most astonishing of all. In the final scenes Russell Beale sits anchored to a chair like Beckett's Hamm in Endgame as if envisioning the chaos around him. And when he tells us that life is "full of sound and fury signifying nothing" he emphasises the final word with a nihilistic despair. Even his death is a kind of assisted suicide to be welcomed in a meaningless universe.
It is as amazing performance. The only problem with this kind of solipsistic Macbeth is that it tends to diminish the other characters as if they simply existed in his dream. Emma Fielding is a perfectly capable Lady Macbeth who is fierce, determined and highly practical: even when she asks "why did you bring the daggers from the place?" it is in the measured tones of an orderly housewife who can't abide mess.
But, although Fielding intriguingly suggests that Lady Macbeth acquires greater femininity in her sleepwalking, she gets little chance to explore the sexual nature of her and Macbeth's relationship.
For the rest, there are some solid supporting performances but little sense of resonant individuality. Tom Burke's Malcolm has a good moment when, after Duncan's murder, he starts towards the dagger-wielding thane as if about to kill him. William Gaunt is also a notably gracious Duncan who gives the out-of-her-depth Lady Macbeth gentle hints in court etiquette. And Silas Carson's Banquo quietly gives the impression that he is aware of Macbeth's murderous intentions and fearful for his own progeny.
Indeed the use of children is one of the production's recurring motifs. They are everywhere: in the court, in the witches' cavern and even in the final battle scenes where the "cream-faced loon" becomes a young boy. It is one of Caird's best ideas: to suggest that Macbeth is constantly mocked by the ubiquity of the children he can never have.
All I miss is a sense of narrative impetus. In examining Macbeth's soul the production sacrifices some of the play's visceral excitement. What you get in the end is a brilliant character study from a remarkable actor rather than the total gesture of this dark, feverish, propulsive and nightmare-inducing play.
