Except in one particular, I do not see how last
Sunday's production of Macbeth could have been improved. We were given the body and bones of the whole thing. Wise, though extensive, cutting made the outlines sharp and compressed the drama into an hour and three-quarters-an achievement in itself. There it all was : the rough throwing together of the elements, the emergence of the seed of implicit tragedy, and its inevitable growth and flowering in the elegiac speeches of Maebeth's final disillusionment. Violent gesture, such as the play acquires on the stage, must tempt the most fastidious actor to rhetoric ; but wireless, by relieving the players of this first necessity, allows them scope for a more deeply comprehended and incisive recitative, and in retrospect I am amazed at the strictness of the compass within which Ralph Richardson expressed the extremes of emotion of the principal character. As Lady Macbeth, Martita 'Hunt evoked' no emotion that was not tinged with a bitter sympathy ; and John Laurie provided a small masterpiece of his own in the manner of Macduff's reception of the dreadful news of his family's annihilation. The one serious flaw in the whole production-the more regrettable because of its frequency- was the presentation of the witches. Even witches may be supposed to possess a sinister dignity, but these were purely pantomime females whose ludicrously overdone squallings jarred with the rest of the production.
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