REVIEW: THREE STARS *** TV heart-throb Sam Heughan struts his stuff as the Thane with mixed results in the RSC’s Macbeth at The Other Place

Macbeth, The Other Place, Stratford, playing until 6th December

3 Stars

BACK in 2016, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his death, the great British public was polled on which was their favourite Shakespeare play. Largely thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie adaption and the attraction of its sexy lead Leonardo DiCaprio to the teen demographic, Romeo and Juliet came top. Macbeth was voted runner-up, ousting A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet to the second spot.

Scholars and critics were called upon to explain the Scottish play’s surprising popularity and pontificated at considerable length about its exploration of the hazardous consequences of naked ambition and the psychological pitfalls of the thirst for power.

Words like conscience and guilt were grandly bandied about, as was the theory that, because it was a shorter work than some of the others, with a smaller, less confusing cast and a simpler plotline in which the baddies eventually get what’s coming to them, those without the benefit of a university doctorate found it dead easy to stomach.

However, the general public, bless ‘em, wasn’t having any of it. I mean, c’mon, any fool knows it’s all about the witches.

The three weird sisters are the key. The better – ie. the badder – they are, the better the show. Simples! Get ’em wrong and you’ve goofed the lot. And it’s amazing how many times directors have actually managed to muck it up. In recent memory the RSC has disastrously replaced them with children, substituted one for a bloke in drag and made them out to be acrobats.

Tonight, we get a coven reminiscent of – and pray forgive me for this young ’uns – no one so much as Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst, the trio of old biddies who used to hold court and put the world to rights in Coronation Street’s Rovers Return back in the early 1960s. Harridans to be sure, but spooky? Nah, not so much.

Alison Peebles’s Iza is our Ena, appreciably creepy. Irene MacDougall’s Mag is our Minnie, so-so and hard to fathom. And Eilidh Fisher’s Nan is our Martha, a kind of misplaced Gothic waif who is somewhat underwhelming as, unfortunately, we can’t hear much of what she’s saying.

So, the witches are OK but not what you might call ones for the ages. And so goes the show. It’s set in a pub, a Glasgow one, peopled by gangsters instead of Highland warriors, guvnors in the place of kings. It’s the sort of unsavoury hostelry Michael Caine often found himself in in Get Carter, only north of the border. Which is all well and good but makes a bit of a nonsense when the script declares the witches have dissolved into thin air but what we’ve actually seen them do is walk out of a lock-in.

Housing it within the relatively intimate Other Place rather than the grander Swan or the main RSC theatre does however mostly suit the scenario, the minimal set changes carried out in pitch black, the audience assaulted with unsettling soundtracks while the furniture gets shifted. It looks and feels authentic enough – pretty much everyone drinks and smokes, and props to costumier Natasha Ward for the Johnny and the Self Abusers T-shirt. They turned into Simple Minds you know.

The staging aside, director Daniel Raggett, lately highly praised for his RSC Edward II, also instigates two signature plot changes, one for the worse, one for the better.

The first involves Lia Williams’ Lady Macbeth, traditionally the hardnut who eggs on her husband to treachery only to unravel under the burden of the horrors she’s encouraged. At first Williams plays the scheming social-climber with commensurate ruthlessness but, in an unhappy deviation from the original, she begins her mental meltdown when it comes to the slaughter of the children. Suddenly she acquires a maternal pang – including helping Fleance escape – that completely contradicts the famous bit where earlier she says she’d bash out the brains of any newborn she had if it meant achieving the power she craves.

This weakens the character – usually a monument to feminine strength even if fatally misdirected – and makes her out to be a faker, a liar. Not really the evil genius that we’re accustomed to and not really what we want.

That said, the production revels in the opportunity the play affords for brutality. At the outset Cawdor, called traitor, is hauled, hands bound, into the pub, his mouth gaffa-taped shut, and is duly offed, under instruction from Gilly Gilchrist’s gangster king Duncan, by his son Malcolm who slits the miscreant’s throat with a Stanley knife.

The bit where Duncan, rattling through a tool box, choosing then disposing with bits and bobs until he alights upon the blade, is a neat and nasty echo of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis’ Butch eventually selects the Samurai sword to dispose of Zed. The actual act of throat-slitting is another Tarantino tribute, this time to Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde carving up the cop in Reservoir Dogs.

If part of what this production set out to do was to bring us face-to-face with how gut-churning real murder is, job done. The choice of mundane, domestic weaponry is inspired.

It’s easy to be desensitised by the theatrical use of big old swords and the like, not so easy to avoid a shudder when the agent of destruction is a clawhead hammer. Surely the abiding image most will take home with them will be Jamie Marie Leary’s heavily pregnant Lady Macduff being bashed on the head then dragged off stage to be audibly bludgeoned to death, followed by her son being led off by Macbeth, a bloody hammer in his hand, to suffer the same appalling fate.

Ah, Macbeth. The run’s already a total sell-out which, considering the RSC’s recently-revealed financial woes, must come as some relief to the company. The ticket sales are anecdotally down to the casting of TV heart-throb Sam Heughan, the hunk from Outlander, as the Thane. And his is indeed a star turn. It’s not so much that he inhabits the role as that the action seems to happen solely to spotlight his presence. His many scenes are not shared, they’re staged around his strutting. He’s incessantly pumped-up and at full pitch, like Al Pacino doing his, “Say hello to my little friend” piece in Scarface. Again and again. Frankly, it’s overbearing, any subtlety or hint of frailty or doubt amplified beyond true credibility.

I guess you could consider it forgivable in a world grown blasé with larger-than-life Trumpian despots But there’s never a moment that Heughan’s not ‘acting’ which makes for a singular grandstand performative display to the detriment of the unfolding drama. In short, we don’t believe him and the production feels unbalanced. It might be worth his while considering dialling it down a little.

It’s well-nigh unbearable watching Williams’ Lady Macbeth purposefully, painstakingly, oh-so-quietly and carefully prepare herself a noose and hang herself over by the bar while he, unaware, is roaring out some disdain or other. His resulting grief is brief and show-y, his self-obsession propelling him to new heights of breast-heaving, vest-tearing, line spitting fury.

What this production does do extremely well, though, is provide the ancillaries with more fullness of character than usual. Nicholas Karimi’s Banquo is understandable, likeable even, and his ghost nicely underplayed when he arrives at the banquet – ludicrously a take-away unpacked from a carrier bag. Every pub I know has signs up saying only food purchased on the premises is to be consumed therein. Anyway, our ghost is nothing akin to the last RSC iteration which resembled something covered in icing you’d pluck off the top of a birthday cake.

Michael Abubakar is the porter-cum-barperson-cum-assassin-by-order who carries out his duties with a reluctant fealty keeping a constant weather eye on self-preservation, and Callum Ross’ Malcolm, who gets to own it all once the mess has cleared up, is a feisty youth, not sure that he’s up to this ruling business but, high on revenge, impetuous enough to give it a go.

The second deviation from the original plot that I touched on earlier is that the witches’ famous “When shall we three meet again?” speech, usually the first thing we hear them say, has been shunted to the very end so it’s what we exit to. The words are delivered in the presence of Banquo’s son Fleance, who they once prophesied would inherit the throne but is usually gone and forgotten by now.

This is a trick RSC regulars have become accustomed to, a device to introduce new perspectives and possibilities. In the most recent Hamlet, Ophelia was given a repeat of the “To be or not to be” bit to underscore that her role is just as important and her madness just as legitimate as the dithering prince’s. And in Measure for Measure, there’s an exposition repeat at the finale which strengthens Isabella’s resolve not to submit to becoming someone else’s possession.

This sudden unexpected reappearance of Fleance is a masterstroke, an ominous sign that there will be further chaos and bloodshed to come, a delight to the crafty crones which adds deliciously to our discomfort.

Overall, though, it’s all a bit too Peaky MacBlinders if you ask me.