The great thing about canonical works is that you can do whatever you want to them — tear them apart, rearrange them, even mock them mercilessly — and they remain intact for the next generation to approve or slaughter. The same is true of Shakespeare’s vice-like tragedy Macbeth, here given a kind of rip-off by the English playwright Zinnie Harris. Its subtitle is “An Undoing,” a play on Lady Macbeth’s line “what is done cannot be undone,” and a manifesto of sorts.
It opens promisingly, with Natasha Herbert as one of the strange sisters, or perhaps the gatekeeper at hell’s gate. She begins the play while warning us about audience expectations and the rigidity of role-playing, setting up a meta-theatricality that will later prove relevant. Then she introduces the bloody soldier (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) and the play proper begins, sticking to Shakespeare’s contours for a while while introducing its own strange twists.
Chief among these is a lengthy cameo by Lady Macduff (Jessica Clarke) – she’s been on a rampage and secretly screwing Banquo (Rashidi Edward). She and Lady M (Bojana Novakovic) are portrayed as sisters or cousins, depending on how well the relationship is going. Duncan (Jim Daly) is a depressed old fool who briefly brings to mind Joe Biden, and Macduff (David Woods) is a sort of ram’s hoe, grave and stern. Macbeth (Johnny Carr) himself is the character Shakespeare intended, at least initially.
Harris has a clean and subversive structure in mind. He envelops the play and the audience in the first act and lets it all unravel in the second (the set makes this real, spinning clockwise in the first half and anticlockwise thereafter). Shakespeare drives Lady Macbeth mad with unconfessed guilt, while this undoing places the burden of madness on her husband. Macbeth is given a sleepwalking scene and his wife recites the “tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. This means that most of the brutality and bloodlust are his.
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If Harris could really come up with an alternative vision, it would be an intriguing challenge for the play, a serious examination of gender and violence. The playwright wants to rescue Lady Macbeth from the constraints of madness and suicide that Shakespeare has imprisoned her in, but the substitute he offers is superficial and colourless. At one point he brings the character out into the audience and lectures us on the inadequacies of the role (are you serious?!), but Harris’s Lady M is neither as nuanced nor as convincing.
Worse, and ultimately depressing, is the effect on Shakespeare’s poetry. Harris uses the original text but cuts off dialogue just before it gets interesting. He delights in cheap anachronisms. He also translates key phrases into “plain English”, like No Fear Shakespeare, making them seem mundane and reductive. For a work that relies so heavily on a strong knowledge of the original play, this is unforgivably condescending.
Director Matthew Lutton keeps things moving and offers some striking imagery, but his actors plod through the text and the mood is often leaden. Novakovic – presumably in an effort to subvert assumptions about the role – delivers a Lady Macbeth of utterly relaxed self-assurance, without any bravado or hunger. Carr is suitably haggard, bewildered and wild in a role stripped to the bone, more comfortable with empty verse than bombast. The great breadth of imagination – and much of the moral horror – is gone. Clarke, Edward and Herbert are generally excellent in support, and Daly and Woods can make some wonderfully silly killers.
Dann Barber’s design is at least extremely helpful in its functionality, even if the set itself is very similar to Shaun Gurton’s work on Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2010 Richard III. The swirling concrete grey spaces are both oppressive and endlessly revealing, like live-action dioramas that grow increasingly surreal and barbaric. Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting is wonderfully eerie and Jethro Woodward’s voice is faintly ominous, like distant thunder. It’s the kind of design that would work perfectly in a traditional Macbeth.
Playing with Shakespeare is fun and sometimes enlightening: Helen Mirren played Prospera (a female Prospero) in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest and there was a charming tenderness to the role; the war games of Oberon and Titania were swapped for messy but occasionally comic effect in the National Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Tom Stoppard dazzled in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Harris wages an engaging war of attrition on Shakespeare’s play, trying to expose it in some way but not bothering to construct his own vision as compensation or counterargument. He first pulls back the curtain, then lowers it.
Anyway, we’ll always have Macbeth.