Hurst heads straight for the heart of darkness
New Zealand Herald, 31 May 2004
By
Peter Calder
The most easily accessible of the great tragedies, Macbeth is
often given fanciful interpretations that place it in modern settings
or tease out of it a study of psychosexual dynamics or the corruptive
force of power.
Michael
Hurst, our most consistently impressive director and performer
of Shakespeare, has come up with a version which says, almost
audibly, "to hell with all that". He wades right in,
feeling for the jet-black heart of the play and finding a man
who, as he told one interviewer, has declared war on his own soul.
In
this reading, Macbeth's "vaulting ambition" is not his
moral flaw but his initial motive power, and the play charts the
growth of the pure malevolence he must develop to achieve his
ends.
This
intensely character-based approach makes for a lean and kinetic
production, stripped of adornment (it's barely two hours, including
interval). It dispenses with the cauldron scene and collapses
the apparitions cleverly into a single presence. In the middle
of it, we watch a man's descent into the moral abyss (his "O,
full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife" is bone-chilling)
that avoids flamboyant dramatics; as the armies march against
him he is casually scornful rather than loud and defiant.
Amid
all this action, Hurst shows - as he did in his magnificent Hamlet
- his unparalleled ability to speak the poetry. Words, snatches
of phrase, sometimes whole passages, explode into life as if never
heard before.
The
production has its less successful elements: I'm not sure that
the "weird sisters" this director has created fit snugly
into the overall conception; the inclusion of the quite unplayable
scene (IV, iii) between Malcolm and Macduff is a glaring blunder,
not least because Keith Adams' stiff and stilted Malcolm looks
like he's wandered in from a Star Trek convention; Peter Daube
never really nails the thankless part of Banquo; and the climactic
fight, conducted with fists, veers dangerously close to slapstick.
But
John Verryt's set, which contracts and expands with the ease of
a breath, is work of world-class standard; Anna Hewlett's viperish
Lady Macbeth is beautifully judged; and the updated, "knock,
knock" Drunken Porter scene gives us exactly the relief the
original gave to Shakespearean audiences.
On
balance, it's not the unalloyed triumph that Hamlet was, but it's
unquestionably not to be missed. I, for one, can't wait until
this man decides to shoulder King Lear.
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2004, New Zealand Herald |