Kill Duncan, Volume 2
By Paul Little, New Zealand Listener, 12 June 2004 edition
MACBETH,
by William Shakespeare, directed by Michael Hurst, Maidment Theatre,
Auckland (to June 26)
There
are Crimean War-era nurses where the witches should be at the
start of this production of Macbeth. It works for me – nurses
can be much scarier than crones in pointy hats waving rubber frogs
around. It's an indication that this version of the tragedy will
add to, rather than subtract from, the text and provide some real
horror, which is not long in coming.
Macbeth,
for Hurst's The Large Group, follows his superlative Hamlet of
last year, using much the same creative team and techniques. Again
the ghosts are light and noise, and the set is as bare as it would
have been in Shakespeare's time, forcing the words to create the
scenes. No cardboard trees come to Dunsinane. There's a lot of
smoke. It creeps through everything, like the evil that overtakes
Macbeth as he moves from being a man who can't act on his desires,
to a man who can't desire anything without acting on it.
Hurst's
two Shakespeare productions have been commendably businesslike.
His business is to present Shakespeare's play, so there's no more
messing around with the text than is good for it. The action is
kept clean and clear, paced and blocked crisply and efficiently.
Hurst
finds things in Macbeth that it's easy to overlook – there
is, we realise, almost as much punning and paradox as in Hamlet.
He also pays due attention to the timely themes of violence, statehood
and good leadership – the final image is of a Nurse/Witch
mopping up blood. With Macbeth gone, the clean-up has begun.
As for those additions, the director's touches are always illuminating.
A boy (the preternaturally talented Edward Giffney) acts as the
witches' familiar, delivering many of their most chilling lines.
The deceased Duncan becomes the Porter, complete with rubber knives
protruding from his chest, turning that character's 400-year-old
jokes into the genuinely macabre laugh-getters that they probably
were for the original audience.
Much
of the fun goes when Lady Macbeth (a riveting Anna Hewlett) dies.
Hurst deals with this by accelerating the action to its conclusion
in a knock-down brawl between Macbeth and Macduff, using techniques
that will be familiar to any viewer of RAW. I saw a wrestling
performance at the Armageddon sci-fi/comics convention (attended
by the Hercules crowd--Hurst's other demographic). The Maidment
version was much more convincing. Tell those kids: Shakespeare
still does the best on-stage violence.
©Copyright
2004, New Zealand Listener
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