Review: Volcano Theatre’s Macbeth, Director’s Cut

York Theatre Royal. Tuesday 22nd November, 2016.

⭐️⭐️

This take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth from Volcano Theatre is hugely ambitious. As promised, it’s ‘a furious two hander’ and both Mairi Phillips and Alex Harries, playing all roles, are bursting with energy and grit throughout. Harries is powerful, raging and charming in turns, while Phillips makes an excellent counterpart, rivalling him with her rage, tenderness and grotesqueness. Their performances are the strongest element of this production by far and their command of Shakespeare’s language is excellent.

Great pains were evidently taken to modernise the play, to make it engaging for younger audiences, and to elevate selected moments by approaching them in outlandish ways. I will never fault of production for working to keep Shakespeare relevant and accessible, but sometimes productions do of course fall short. The main flaw was that there is so much variety in terms of styles and directions (across set, performance and sense of narrative) that few of them made a truly powerful impression.

An interpretive dance opener is certainly engaging, but then the actors break the fourth wall, have a little banter with the audience and then launch back into character. I sat wondering exactly which style the production would follow, and the answer proved to be both and neither. Perhaps that is by design, and this was intended to be an indiscernible hybrid, or maybe I just missed the keystone to a high brow approach, but as a whole, even with a very strong talented duo leading it, the production lacks clarity and clear direction. Freedom with chronology and selections are all well and good under the tag line ‘Director’s Cut’, but the selections and the choices for presenting them could be much more effective.

There are a number of clever approaches though, such as casting the audience as the non-verbal witches, the use of dolls as additional characters, and having lines for the audience members cajoled onto the stage for the banquet scene. One particularly strong moment is the chilling final scream of Lady Macbeth, which provides the gust with which the candle she holds is outed- a beautifully executed moment, and very effective.

Equally effective is the visual spectacle of Harries becoming Lady Macbeth’s arms for the infamous ‘Out damn’d spot’ scene; an excellent symbolic moment rich with meaning. The use of dolls is hit and miss; as watchman, it works well; as Banquo, it’s slightly comical but a little lack-lustre; as Macduff’s tragic soon-to-be-brutishly-murdered-son, it’s greatly effective.

Comic elements provide some great moments too, including slapstick, some ad-libbed profanities and a number of instances where the actors shook off the roles momentarily to bicker- ‘don’t tell me what to do’ gains a certain laugh but doesn’t exactly lend itself to the ‘intense’ and ‘stripped bare’ core of Macbeth with any real gravity. Excepting the scene between the Macbeths, which is great in demonstrating the disturbing dynamics of their relationship, the other references are oddly placed and genuinely out of place. Which leads me to the bizarre homo-erotic interpretation of Macduff’s murdering of Macbeth. The suggestion of a lustful attachment between the two bitter enemies seems just too incongruous.

I’m not a purist. I applaud this production and company for taking on a play as complex as Macbeth, tackling it as a two-person extravaganza, and evidently working hard to make it as ground-breakingly different and engaging as possible. It’s certainly different, and the talented cast put the ‘furious’, ‘extreme’ and ‘claustrophobic’ descriptors centre stage. I can’t fault the actors, I can’t fault the ambition when it comes to modernisation, but in this case, like the protagonist, the production appears to have ‘vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’.