Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

live performance from the Donmar Warehouse (2024) screened on 11 February 2025

A chance to revisit the excellent production directed last year by Max Webster featuring David Tennant as Macbeth and Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth, with a supporting cast refreshingly speaking almost universally with Scottish accents (except for the children Fleance, the young Macduff, and the young Siward).

In the auditorium the audience was provided with headphones to listen to the entire play, which was performed without an interval to maximise the ongoing tension. In the cinema we heard the text through the normal speaker system, but it remained intimate and happily devoid of the jarring effect of listening in a different medium to voices projecting for the stage. The eeriness of the encounters with the weird sisters, and Macbeth's terror at witnessing Banquo's ghost, remained powerful; indeed the soundscape in general transferred well.

There were some aspects of the production that I had forgotten, but which the camerawork reminded me of. In particular a generic young boy was occasionally visible throughout the play, though generally not on stage - the back wall could be opaque or transparent as the lighting changed. This pointed up the unresolved question of whether Macbeth had a son or not (the textual evidence seems contradictory on this point); or perhaps it signified that he was betraying his personal innocence by pursuing his ambition. This culminated in a brief moment when Macbeth held the boy, perhaps MacDuff's son, in his arms only to pass him on to a murderer; and later, in grappling with the young Siward, there was another embrace in which the king broke the boy's neck.

As in the production at the Almeida, it appeared that Lady Macbeth was discussing Macduff's absence with Lady Macduff (it is the thane Ross in the text); but the link to Lady Macbeth's mental distress so powerfully evoked at the Almeida, where she actually witnessed the massacre of the Macduff family, was not pursued here. 

I had also forgotten the updated speech of the porter, who knowingly engaged with the audience, making some disparaging remarks about London audiences (as perceived by those north of the border), and complaining that he didn't have headphones so he couldn't hear what was being said. This was a clever adaptation of a long speech which, though vital to the dramatic shape of the play, often runs the risk of being tedious for a modern audience, since its references are 'topical' to the sixteenth century rather than our own.

All in all, this was a fine opportunity to revisit an outstanding production of the play.

(See also my review of the Almeida production from October 2021, and a paragraph in the "seen in 2024" post, to see how differently the two directors approached this plays problems.)

Life of Pi

by Lolita Chakrabarti based on Yann Martel's novel

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 11 June 2022

After the erudite expositions of Socratic philosophy in Cancelling Socrates, I saw on the same day a rather different approach to dramatising fundamental questions about existence in Lolita Chakrabarti's inventive adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, in which a young boy (Hiran Abeysekera, ably supported by a dozen cast members and assorted puppeteers) first faces and then accounts for a lengthy voyage across the Pacific Ocean adrift in a lifeboat as the only human survivor of a shipwreck (he is accompanied by a number of animals including a huge Bengal tiger incongruously named Richard Parker).

The play, directed by Max Webster with brilliant set and costume designs by Tim Hatley, opens in the hospital in Mexico where Pi is recovering from his ordeal; representatives of the Canadian consulate (Pi and his family were due to settle in Canada) and the Japanese owners of the wrecked ship are interviewing him to try to find out what happened, but are baffled by the extravagant story he tells of shipping a zoo from India to Canada, and the perils of sharing a small lifeboat with a large tiger.

Here is another play in which narrative plays a significant part, but it is only a framing device, quickly seguing into dramatic reconstructions of the major events of Pi's story; with a dazzling array of video projections and more traditional opening and closing of doors and walls the coldly lit hospital ward is transformed into the vibrant town in which Pi and his family live, the port of embarkation, and the cramped conditions of the ocean-going vessel. Lastly the outlines of the lifeboat emerged as if by magic from the stage floor as the vast loneliness of the ocean was evoked by waves projected onto the floor and expansive vistas of sky elsewhere on the stage. All the while, fantastic puppetry designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell and directed by the latter brings to life the animals and ocean creatures encountered by the resilient boy at the centre of the story.

The boy has grown up exposed to three very different religious traditions - Hinduism, Islam and Christianity - and has participated in the communal aspects of all of them perhaps without deeply understanding their theological underpinnings. However he remains touchingly convinced that a religious outlook on life is essential; atheists he can cope with because at least they have a belief, while agnostics simply flummox him. This attitude undoubtedly helps him to survive even as the cold rationality of his intercolutors threatens to unhinge him; it's a remarkable testimony to the power of stagecraft, as much as to the power of fiction, that we are on his side as he asserts his right to tell his own story in his own way.

It was really exhilarating to see a play rush headlong through a strong and exciting tale with such confidence and energy.

Henry V

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 10 March 2022

Kit Harington plays the King with a supporting cast of fourteen taking all the other roles in Max Webster's production of Henry V, designed by Fly Davis. On a bare stage of four marbled tiers or steps, with a featureless metallic wall at the back which occasionally splits apart in the form of a St George's Cross, the career of the hero king from wastrel prince to victorious military leader is played out with sobering attention to the darker side of his progress.

After the famous Prologue apologising for the paucity of stage effects when dealing with such weighty military and political actions, the low expectations of the new king's character are underscored by the interpolation of part of the first tavern scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff from Henry IV Part One, and the crushing rejection of the latter by the former from Henry IV Part Two. Only then are we presented with Hal's full transformation into King Henry as he listens to the Archbishop of Canterbury's interminable lecture about the Salic Law in France (or properly belonging somewhere further east, as the case may be), its tediousness underlined by a confusing Powerpoint presentation projected onto the back wall. The Dauphin's insulting gift of tennis balls does far more to kindle the King's ire and to convince him to invade France to claim his right to the kingdom.

The play veers beween high politics and the less glamorous life of the ordinary soldiers. Indeed, some of the named infantry were once Prince Hal's tavern friends, and two of them come to a bad end, Bardolph in particular singled out for a judicial hanging which the King watches with apparent impassivity. For this production, which is in modern dress, movement director Benoit Swan Pouffer brought in Tom Leigh, a former Royal Marines Commando, to teach the cast basic military drill and to discuss with them the often traumatic impact of combat. The result can be seen in the intimidating manoeuvres on stage, but also in the pained reactions to some events (in particular the order to kill all the French prisoners at Agincourt, which is brutally performed onstage) and in the wild partying following the battle.

All this helps to sharpen the contrast between the high flown rhetoric of the famous speeches, which are wonderfully delivered by Kit Harington, and the sordid reality of close combat. The mutual incomprehension of the two sides (English and French) is emphasised by having the French characters speak French among themselves, with English translations provided on a screen. This cleverly extends the device used in the scene with Princess Katharine as she struggles to learn English, which is often played for laughs. Here, it is not a matter for laughter, and later the Princess has a decidedly unromantic encounter with the King whose plain-speaking wooing is not the bumbling effort of a stranger to flirting (as he suggests), but rather nothing more than a steely determination to consolidate a business deal no matter what the Princess thinks.

Indeed several scenes often used to lighten the tone here receive a more sober and disturbing turn. Captain Fluellen, usually portrayed as an amusing pedant, is here more of an obsessive, and his baiting of Pistol, forcing him to eat a leek, is is an exercise in sadistic bullying. Luckily for the hapless soldier Williams, who had unwittingly wagered to box the King's ear (not knowing who he was talking to before the battle), the scene in which the King asks Fluellen to bear the exchanged glove was omitted: this Fluellen would probably have shot Williams out of hand. Instead the King and Williams resolve the matter directly without the intervening 'joke'. Everyone is clearly very skittish after the victory; the atmosphere is credibly febrile and the King himself erupts in brittle laughter when he is presented with the account of the slain.

It was inevitable that the play would resonate with the current crisis in Ukraine. 'Once more unto the breach' is the rallying cry of a leader besieging an enemy town, and the King's later threats to the governor of Harfleur are a chilling reminder of what a victorious army can do to a town that did not surrender. It is not possible in view of the shelled urban areas in Ukraine to shrug this off as an example of medieval babarity which the modern world has outgrown. By contrast the great St Crispin's Day speech is the exhortaton of a leader in the face of overwhelming odds (a fact perhaps obscured by the unexpected outcome of the Agincourt battle). This too has its parallel in the events unfolding; the outcome is not yet known. 

In frank acknowledgement of the uneasy parallels between art and life, Kit Harington interrupted the audience applause at the end of the play to explain that there would be a retiring collection for the Red Cross, to which we were invited to contribute. It was generously supported.