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Macbeth
after William Shakespeare

    Blue Raincoat Theatre Company has created an ambitious adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth which guts the text in favor of a physical expressiveness characteristic of this company's past work. Dance, mime, and gesture paper over the cracks in the narrative, which has been stripped back to push the elements of psychological disorder to the fore. The entire cast of nine players are on stage at all times, whether their characters are dead or alive, present or absent. Though there is also plenty of doubling up typical of this size of company, the general effect of their presence is to suggest a constant, whirling host of bodies and spirits which haunt Macbeth (portrayed by Kevin Quinn) and Lady Macbeth (Caroline Lynch) throughout the play. There are several scenes in which they literally gyrate around them, waving flags, beating drums, laughing, shouting, mocking, praising; simultaneously suggesting the tumult of large scale social perception (if they represent the people of the land observing the terror from afar) and more internalized mental distress and decay (as the phantoms which perturb the murderers).
    Director Niall Henry and his cast have obviously spent a lot of time rehearsing and choreographing the staging. The logistical complexity makes for a tremendous theatrical spectacle. There is a lot of movement, both of whole bodies around the stage and limbs in personal space. These movements are carefully timed and very fluid. The actors seem to swim across the stage much of the time. There is a trancelike quality to the production, which frequently attains the texture of a dream, or, perhaps more appropriately, of a nightmare. A few simple props suffice to suggest all kinds of spaces as the actors push them around on wheels, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
    There are some notable scenes and clever visual conceits. The costumes seem to reflect a nineteenth or early twentieth century revolutionary backdrop. Red draping frames the set and a large red flag is waved at several key points signifying uprising or upheaval. Most of the colors are bright and vibrant, primarily whites and reds (with some greys). Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are clad in darker shades, although the latter dons an all-important red cloak during her "out damned spot" scene (dialogue which she never actually speaks in this version). Brendan Ellis portrays both Duncan and MacDuff, a curious gambit which makes more sense in the light of the compression. As Duncan, Ellis constantly haunts the set, another of the absent presences which drive Macbeth insane. MacDuff, by contrast, is a reduced character, referred to but actually never present until his climactic appearance. This has the effect of strategically liberalizing a phantom threat, keeping Duncan without giving him dialogue and making MacDuff more part of the dread hand of fate than a dramatic presence or a force for change in himself.
    The play is filled with such touches and it has many spectacular moments. Yet something has been lost in the adaptation, namely the richness of the text itself. Given this level of attention to detail in physical staging, something obviously had to give. What is absent here more significantly than any character or individual speech is a sense of spoken language. It is an important component of any dramatic work, especially one by Shakespeare. Even when abbreviated, these plays usually provide the pleasure of hearing the tones, rhythms, and playful complexities of Shakespeare’s dialogue in conjunction with the action and characterization. There is dialogue in this adaptation, and the poetry is still there. Yet it is not enunciated with the level of clarity needed to give it the strength to stand alongside the intensity of the staging. It is quite literally a case of the production upstaging the play. This was most definitely not the case with Blue Raincoat’s recent version of The Playboy of the Western World, so it seems curious that it has happened here.
    Perhaps the performances are partly responsible. Quinn has a tough job as Macbeth. He is the most static character on stage, which means that much of the colorful activity surrounds but does not touch him. This actually puts a lot of weight on his ability to absorb this stylistic and thematic design. Even more pressure is put upon him by the script revisions. Paring back the character of Lady Macbeth to make her little more than a supporting player means that Macbeth himself is pushed towards the spotlight even more forcefully. Without her malice and ambition to drive him and balance the character, Macbeth becomes more individuated (and isolated). This fits in perfectly with the sense of psychological enclosure created by this production, but it means that the role becomes more Hamlet than Macbeth.
    Quinn, who has played Hamlet with this company, simply doesn’t register the kind of presence required. His speeches lack vibrancy and a sense of the complexity of emotions they are meant to invoke. His facial expressions are deliberately frozen most of the time, but this contributes further to his inability to be as fully expressive as he could be. The same problem touches all of the performances. While all of the cast do a terrific job physically, and the play has that unique and visually powerful approach to the material, none of the dialogue touches the heart or mind as it ought to. This is because the characters have been employed in the service of a directorial vision which, while interesting, devalues the communicative power of the text and the more basic dramatic devices such as the voice in favor of expressive movement and general physicality.
    The production is still spellbinding though. Shakespeare is now and always has been subject to necessary and stimulating revisioning, and no one would argue for the ‘sacred cow’ approach to the original text. As such Blue Raincoat Theatre’s Macbeth is not only a valid adaptation, but one which offers much to the Irish theatregoer in terms of expanding the palette of styles and devices used to communicate with them by Irish theatre companies. Still, one can’t help but miss hearing Macbeth’s "dagger" speech.

    Dublin, October 9, 2001                                                                                   - Harvey O'Brien