In the last three years the Young Vic has become a dramatic nut-cracker. It has continually prised apart familiar plays to reveal a new kernel. Carrie Cracknell’s mesmeric 2012 production of A Doll’s House was a high point. Drawing on dance, she gave the play an utterly distinctive rhythm. The action seemed to float.
In Macbeth, which Cracknell co-directs with choreographer Lucy Guerin, the dance influence is more explicit and less effective. The witches are rubber-limbed mannequins, clad in hideous, knicker-revealing body-stockings. They roll and jerk with generic weirdness. Yet if they are writhings of Macbeth’s war-torn mind, why don’t they correspond to his description? Why are they not just a bit withered? Or is the discrepancy a sign of his disturbance?
There are a myriad of notions here, not all of them congruent with each other. The action seems to be taking place in a version of Abu Ghraib. Heads are enclosed in transparent hoods before summary execution. The landscape is also the map of a changing, threatened, unstable mind. Speeches in the final scene are uttered by the dead Banquo. Macduff’s children, yet to be slaughtered, flit around as wordless ghosts in sheets.
You can’t see Birnham Wood for the trees. Actually you don’t see Birnham Wood at all. It seems to me a pity that outdoor scenes, often among Shakespeare’s most atmospheric, are among the first things to go in current productions. There were no battlements in Lyndsey Turner’s Hamlet. Here, there is no heath for the weird sisters.
Lizzie Clachan’s design encases the action in a grey concrete tunnel. The perspectives are giddy. As people come through the small opening high at the back of the stage they look enormous. The space is unreliable. Walls slip and slide around.
The pace of Shakespeare’s most exciting play is slowed by so much visual distraction. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Anna Maxwell Martin has, however, taken her husband’s words too much to heart. Her Lady Macbeth is incisive but so rapidly spoken that it is sometimes hard to grasp what she is saying. A particular loss, as she is a particularly thoughtful actress. John Heffernan’s Macbeth is original: reflective, numbed with horror, solitary. Not naturally blood-boltered, but as he gives the “tomorrow” speech slumped like an old sack in the corner of the stage, unforgettable.
