Killer without menace
Lloyd Evans
Macbeth Almeida The Anniversary Garrick Mission impossible for Simon Russell Beale. This brilliant, charismatic actor seems mesmerised by the notion that greatness lies in complete adaptability. He has set himself the task of scaling every one of the theatre’s many peaks. This year, it’s Scotland but he hasn’t brought the right gear for the Highlands. Ideally, Shakespeare’s heroes are played by handsome, athletic actors rippling with sexual dynamism. That’s why Gielgud, for all his distinction as a verse speaker, stamped his authority on relatively few of the great roles. Russell Beale has similar disadvantages and Macbeth inevitably lays them bare. His immense talent is reflective, discursive, meditative, ethereal. He acts with his brain first, and his brain — if it had any sense — wouldn’t choose to play a mediaeval robber-baron looking like Great Uncle Bulgaria. He has a wonderful blokeish tenderness about him, but there’s no menace or evil in his make-up. The motto of his face is that he wouldn’t harm a living thing. The result is a performance that is absorbing but all askew. A worrier togged up as a warrior.
Disciples of SRB know that Chekhov is his natural medium. No surprise then to see him play the banqueting scene as a mix of melodrama and eccentric comedy. Though I usually applaud any blend of high tragedy and low comedy, it’s pushing frivolity too far to turn Macbeth into a variety act and to channel all the dramatic riches of the passage into the ha-ha of a sitcom. The atmosphere is further betrayed by mean production values. No banqueting table, just a circle of stools where the cowed noblemen sit like confessing alcoholics or students at a dinner party. Fitful laughter from the audience suggested confusion underpinned by nervous dismay.
Emma Fielding, a young and lovely Lady Macbeth, has the same difficulties with her physique. She works hard to overcome the flawless symmetry of her bonny, wellscrubbed features. And as a pair of psychotic murderers she and her husband make a very unlikely duo. Imagine Stalinist Russia falling into the hands of a nice couple from Godalming.
The smaller roles are marred, as always, by vacuous posturings. This can’t be helped. The play has too many short scenes where Gothic mercenaries come crowding noisily on to the boards to say, ‘Ay, my good Lord,’ at their commanders before stomping off into the wings, tassels swishing and jerkins a-creak. Sara Powell provides a welcome relief from the toy soldiers, transforming her brief appearance as Lady Macduff into a disturbing vision of heroism and defiance. Her murder, enacted with quiet, horrific realism, delivers a rare flash of truth. All in all, the swordplay is one of the production’s virtues: there’s hardly any of it. When Macduff finally confronts Macbeth, we’re spared the usual prancing pirouettes. The opponents meet mid-stage, sink to their knees, deliver their lines, then, wham!, Macduff thrusts at Macbeth and the wicked king keels over with a thump, like a rhino hit with a tranquilliser dart. Dust rises around him and Macduff retreats, faintly disgusted. Perhaps he was thinking that none of this was really necessary. Had Chekhov written more than four masterpieces, it wouldn’t have been.
A big broad comedy has arrived at the Garrick from the Liverpool Playhouse where it was a huge hit. Will it work in London? Bill McIlwraith’s 1966 play has strange parallels with The Homecoming. The premise is identical: anxious son introduces bride to suspicious siblings and tyrannical parent. But where Pinter blurs or conceals motives, McIlwraith brings everything to the surface and explores his material for laughs. The exposition is clumsy and some of the farcical devices are incredible, but the characterisation is assured and the mood of emotional brutality is roundly convincing. The plot is so simple that the climax — kids triumph over Mum — is foreseeable from the start, but this gives the proceedings the purity and clarity of sport. It’s a bullfight in a drawing-room.
Sheila Hancock delivers a towering performance as the ghastly cockney matriarch, a role she leavens with a cunning sympathy. From the word go, she starts wrecking her son’s relationship. ‘Oh, he needs constant praise,’ she tells the fiancée, ‘or he goes sulking off to the nearest prostitute.’ Later on she fakes her grandchildren’s deaths in order to score points over her daughter-in-law. That’s where this comedy is aimed, right below the belt. Its vocabulary of crude and readily intelligible gestures mean that it will appeal most to those who like the theatre least. That’s what hits are made of.
Previous page
