PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Macbeth Indeed, Is He Dead?
By Harry Haun
Patrick Stewart, Rupert Goold and Kate Fleetwood, Byron Jennings, Rachel Ticotin and Michael Feast, Mark Rawlings, Gabrielle Piacentile and Bill Nash. photo by Aubrey Reuben
The man who came to dinner in the Chichester Festival Theatre's aggressively reconceptualized Macbeth which made a surprise, 11th-hour landing at the Lyceum April 8 is the fresh-killed Banquo, a bloody spectacle only the guilty can see.
He arrives by freight elevator at the back of the stage, still a whopping mass of wounds, steps from Lady Macbeth's chair onto the dining table and crosses it to point an accusatory, bloody finger at the host who committed this murder most foul.
Patrick Stewart in the title role, guilty as charged, recoils in self-incriminating horror on seeing Banquo at the banquet, and the stage is plunged into blackness.
After a head-clearing intermission, the scene is taken from the top again this time from the perspective of the dinner guests who are watching their host become unhinged by a conscience-gnawing apparition. Macbeth attempts a recovery, raises his glass to "the general joy of the table" and manages an even keel till the ghost of Banquo comes back for seconds. Then, his partner in life and crime must intervene.
"You have displaced the mirth," Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood ) declares severely to him, dispersing their guests before his hallucinations extend beyond even her damage control. Soon, the consequences of killing your way to the crown weigh heavily on her too, and she wanders around, rubbing imaginary blood off her hands.
Advertisement
There is a calculated method in this madness, director
Rupert Goold later explained: "I was just sitting there in the rehearsal hall, looking at the script, thinking 'There are two ways of doing the Banquo appearance: One is that you see him; one is that you don't.' I once played Banquo, so I know. I never could decide which one to go with, so I finally said, 'Oh, what the hell, let's just do them both.'"
Newly turned 36 and looking even younger, Goold still qualifies for Boy Wonder status. Certainly, he exhibits a young man's daring at playing fast and loose with the classics. One of Shakespeare's shorter works, Macbeth in this particular resurrection tips the scales at three hours due to a full load of tricks and innovations from Goold.
His favorite example of risk-taking that paid dividends? "I think we did pretty well with the sound design and the lighting design." (Composer Adam Cork concocted a brooding, wasp-like buzz, punctuating that periodically with loud clangs and assorted sounds that go bump in the night; the lighting from Howard Harrison is uncharacteristically hot, often blindingly bright. ) "Normally, Macbeth is done in the dark where you can't see anything, but we decided to go in the opposite direction."
Goold starts unloading his bag of tricks right at the outset by reversing the play's first two scenes. Instead of three witches cackling and chanting over a cauldron in the woods, he commences with King Duncan on the battle front. No one is credited with the set a bland, blocky, unprepossessing room where Strindberg's Miss Julie may have hung out. Mostly, it passes for a cellar kitchen in Macbeth's castle, but flashes of light and video projections by Lorna Heavey turn it into a field of war.
The witches, played by Sophie Hunter, Polly Frame and Niamh McGrady , swirl eerily about the stage menacing figures much like The Crucible 's demonically possessed. They are, by turns, battlefield nurses or household servants, depending on how they fold their headdresses. "Necessity is the mother of invention," laughed Goold.
Except for the conspicuously good work on stage, Goold is at a loss in explaining the fortune that has followed this production. "The gods are just smiling on us," he said.
"Tradition has it that Macbeth is supposed to be such an unlucky play, but we've succeeded a lot with it." The production world-premiered at the Chichester Festival last May 25, moved to London's Gielgud on Sept. 21, set up shop at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February and now has settled on Broadway for a limited run through May 24, critical hosannas following the show every major step of the way.
That last loop-de-loop almost didn't happen because all the Broadway houses were taken or spoken for, but the Lyceum landlords made room by evicting that quirky little Mark Twain/David Ives comedy, Is He Dead? , slightly ahead of schedule.
It's ironic, and fitting, that Byron Jennings (who won the Joe A. Callaway Award for his villainy in Is He Dead? ) is the first actor to shout theatrical life back into the Lyceum as doomed King Duncan, uttering the prophetic line, "What bloody man is that?"
This is Jennings' third consecutive performance at the Lyceum he was in Inherit the Wind before Is He Dead? but he already knows his chain is going to be broken by [title of show] , which takes up residency there July 17. "They already cast that," he relayed. "I plan to spend the summer with my sons, and I'm looking forward to it."
Jennings and Rachel Ticotin , who plays the equally ill-fated Lady Macduff, are the two American replacements who stepped into roles that were vacated after the BAM engagement. "This has been a wonderful group of actors so supportive," she trilled. "We had no problems fitting in at all because of their generosity of spirit."
Nine-year-old Gabrielle Piacentile , in her Broadway debut as Ticotin's youngest, was last seen as Tootie in the Meet Me in St. Louis revival at the Irish Rep and had to admit Meet Me at Elsinore was quite a different, darker experience, but she seemed to be enjoying the job all the same "especially backstage." What happens backstage? "I don't know if I should say," she replied with a broad, mischievous grin.
The stage-seasoned Michael Feast , whose Macduff is the one character on the premises "not born of woman" (a fatal plot point), is also marking his Broadway bow as is the majority of the 18-member British cast. "I suppose you have to say there's something very special about working on Broadway," he conceded, "for actors, certainly, of my generation. So many of the people I've worked with as a young man who have come here people like Ian Richardson loved Broadway more than they loved London. At least, I got that feeling when they would speak about it."
Although Macduff prevails at the end, he does put in a lot of grieving time on stage getting there first discovering the body of the murdered Duncan and later learning his entire family has been wiped out. His responses are polls apart. "Sorrow was one of the things that interested me about this character," he admitted. "I see his reaction to the king's death as being a much more public and theatrical grief. That's in contrast to the quiet internal kind of grief that he feels over the loss of his family."
As Broadway openings go, this one was on the subdued side. Another recitation of The Scottish Play brought out the serious playgoers but a full house of them, filling the mezzanine and balcony to close-to-overflowing.
The turn-out include Phyllis Newman , Indiscretions co-stars Kathleen Turner (who may, or may not, have put on hold her hopes of returning to Broadway as Lady M) and Roger Rees (a memorable Malcolm in a London Macbeth ), Joe Benincasa of The Actors Fund of America, Caroline McCormick and Peter Strauss (who are married to the two American replacements in the cast), Bill Kux , Met baritone Thomas Hampson (who has sung Verdi's Macbeth on numerous occasions), playwright Lynn Nottage and dance great Jacques d'Amboise. Continued...
