Review by Dan Sinclair
⭐️⭐️
In the UK, Shakespeare is treated with almost God-like reverence and his scripts are the holy texts. Dare to alter, adapt or cut them, and the ghost of Laurence Olivier will get you in your sleep. This has never sat right with me, yes Shakespeare is a wordsmith, but so was Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Sophocles, and these are regularly torn apart and rebuilt for a contemporary audience (yes, they are also translations but I find it hard to believe that Simon Stephens/Alice Birch/Robert Icke are fluent in Ancient Greek and Russian). This production asks us to consider how Shakespeare’s cautionary tale speaks to us now, unfortunately, I have no idea what it is saying.
Curtain up on the three witches… or apparently not. No boiling, toiling or troubling but instead we jump straight to Lady Macbeth, listening to a voicemail from her husband. Yeah it’s fine, I didn’t need to understand what the prophecy was anyway. Down the phone he explains - wait, mobile phones exist in this Macbeth? But onwards the infamous play goes. It’s a complex, but well trodden story: Macbeth sees some witches who tell him he will be king, his wife convinces him to kill said king, he goes mad with power, his wife just goes mad and they all die. In an attempt to modernise, the production was peppered with ‘hello young people, you know what this thing is right?’ Vapes, an excruciating Charli XCX Brat moment, mobile phones, vlogs, but treat an audience like children and they will treat you with the same respect.
An especially baffling choice came at the top of the banquet scene. Before Macbeth can be haunted by the recently deceased ghost of his best friend Banquo (not that we’d know because they cut the start of the play where we see them be best friends), Macbeth breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging that ‘wow isn’t Shakespeare confusing, just to recap this is what’s happened so far!’ Come on.
Director Richard Twyman and Dramaturg Rikki Henry are two top-notch creatives, they’re well versed (get it) in staging Shakespeare and tearing up the rule book, but I consistently felt… baffled. Live video seemed to be thrown about willy-nilly, the porter scene was left in, but the witches were cut? And the bubbling, toiling and troubling was inserted into the banquet scene, and then yada yada. My parents taught me that if you’ve got nothing nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. In a venue as exciting and consistent as the Lyric Hammersmith and with a cast and crew of this calibre, we have to demand more of our theatre.
BUT I DO HAVE NICE THINGS TO SAY. Amongst this messy production, there were some charming performances. As Ross, Sophie Stone was enchanting, carrying a much needed slither of light into every scene she touched. Ammar Haj Ahmad’s Macduff swaggered about, beating his chest before giving us the one genuinely touching moment of the play, as he hears the news of his slaughtered wife and child - it gave me a window into the glorious production it could’ve been, full of drama and spit.
Having seen Sam Lyon-Behan’s exceptional fight choreography work in Coriolanus, this felt poor, even getting sniggers from the audience. A rather half-hearted slap up paired with dramatic bagpipes and drums was a perfect example of the lack of cohesion between the creative elements. I felt especially enraged by the preshow lighting; the yellow strip lights caused the entire theatre to become sepia-toned and dull. Looking down at your hand or the person next to you, only grey. A lovely trick to show us what lights can do - but WHY? Had it been used even ONCE in the production, sure.
Somewhere between its 2023 production at the Northern Stage, and this version at the Lyric Hammersmith, something seems to have gone very wrong. All is not well in Scotland. As The Scottish Play, it felt about as Scottish as a bowl of Eton Mess, parading around a haggis, bagpipes and a few cans of Tennents doesn’t make up for a complete hodge podge of accents, even a Russell Brand impression from Macbeth. If you use cultural markers to indicate that we’re in contemporary Scotland - then stick to it. If anything, this production makes me want to see the adaptation that it could’ve been, and I can genuinely see underneath that it would’ve been great. Live video, house lights on, singing, a crazy set, sign me up. But this version just felt embarrassed to be a Shakespeare play. And that’s all I could feel.
Macbeth is playing at the Lyric Hammersmith until 29th March
Tickets from: https://lyric.co.uk/shows/macbeth/
Photos by Richard Lakos