How do you stage Macbeth? When I first went to the theatre it was a two-interval spectacle. Terry Hands's production, presented in the 200-seat black box of Clwyd's Emlyn Williams Theatre, hurtles along like an express. At 110 minutes it is fast, exciting, an unbroken arc of crime and punishment. Even so, you pay a price for the emphasis on the play's unstoppable narrative drive.
Visually, the show is astonishing: many lights, I once suggested, make Hands's work and here he brilliantly uses fitful illumination to evoke the fearful atmosphere of Shakespeare's night-piece. Burly, baronial, greatcoated figures emerge out of darkness into pin-bright spots. At one point Macbeth is framed in a smoky funnel of light against a flickering torch. And Hands creates the emotional contrast of the England scene by placing Macduff at the centre of a cross projected on to the stage-floor. Even if you didn't speak English, you'd understand this was a play full of terror, madness, tyranny and redemptive virtue.
But the stress on pace, at the expense of inwardness, doesn't always help Owen Teale's Macbeth. Teale plays him off the front foot as an aggressive warrior whose response to events is instinctively physical: he highlights Macbeth's sensitivity to slurs on his virility and his insanely escalating violence so that even Lady M's doctor is not safe from his sword. But there is within Macbeth an irony and melancholy that gets short shrift here. Teale is sturdy, virile, fearsome; but the production's speed inhibits him from exploring the part's tonal contrasts.
Vivien Parry's dark, vivacious Lady Macbeth, however, is one of the best in recent memory. The lines appear to spring new-minted from her brain so that she pauses before "direst cruelty" as if willing herself to evil. Daubed with blood, she instinctively starts to cleanse her hands in anticipation of the sleepwalking scene and when Macbeth publicly confesses to their murder she advances upon him with an aghast stare as if to intimidate him into silence.
Parry is one of the production's unequivocal successes along with Richard Elfyn's sinister, threatening Banquo and the three witches of Jenny Livesey, Victoria Pugh and Nicola Westmoore who offer incantatory Welsh spells, embody the apparitions they conjure up and, at the last, return to disable Macbeth in battle making him a creature of fate. All this is well done and kept a largely young audience rapt. I just feel less speed would allow more room for Shakespeare's internalisation of thought and imagination.
Until November 13. Box office: 01352 755114.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
