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Scottish play given Northern grit
The way to dusty death: Branagh's Macbeth at bay Pictures MIF and NT Live Macbeth Manchester International Festival St Peter's Church, Ancoats, Manchester **** SIR Kenneth
Branagh’s acceptance of an invitation from this year’s Manchester
International Festival (MIF) caused surprise in some quarters.
Manchester? Why not London? Why not an established, reputable company?
Why not the National Theatre, founded by Ken’s forerunner Laurence
Olivier, with whom he has often been compared, and whose inimitable
voice he even wonderfully spoofed on film (Marilyn)? And why perform – and audition it - in a church? But Olivier was not one
to dodge risks: when he launched his legendary
Othello at
Chichester with Maggie Smith, then filled the ailing Old Vic; paraded
Henry V,
or parts of it, in a Globe Theatre-like Jacobean auditorium; took on
Archie Rice in The Entertainer;
or a Nazi mass-murderer (Marathon Man).
The parallels continue: Branagh as Hitler’s aide
Heydrich, plotting the Final Solution as urbanely as Olivier would have
done; Branagh at Harfleur and Agincourt; pirouetting in the less
successful, but daring, Love’s Labour’s Lost; Branagh the
entrepreneur, ever the courageous gambler. There is something of the last in the venue he
and his West Virginian co-director, Rob Ashford, have settled on, or
accepted, for this new Macbeth. St. Peter’s Church, in the once
heavily industrial suburb of Ancoats, on Manchester inner city’s eastern
fringe, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, once Manchester’s most
populous district, bordering the late 18thC Rochdale Canal and first
recorded, coincidentally (‘Elnicot’), around the time Macbeth ruled
Scotland, is, or has become, an extraordinary resurrected building. Reached through a gamut of gaunt two century-old
brick tenements and classic back-to-back cotton workers’ housing,
presided over by a benign ‘plain’ rose window that achieves a miraculous
effect midway (the Lighting, by Neil Austin is wonderful from start to
finish), the church offers a curious House of Commons-like layout, where
we, the audience, writhe or revel at the gore on either side of a narrow
channel, like banner-wavers surveying a medieval joust.
As Malcolm Canmore, this heir would soon bite the
hand that fed him, launching campaigns against England in an attempt to
wrest Northumbria – part of the dead Siward’s suzerainty – from Edward
the Confessor: and with Vlahos’s confident striding and subtle political
camouflage, you can believe it. This Macbeth does not slither into a decline: he
is never at peace with himself – loopy, in fact - from the outset. In
the opening scenes Branagh is almost a fey presence, very much an
also-ran to Yuill’s thrusting, and strangely alert, Banquo. You can see
he has reason to fear a man who is at least his equal. The two stride
around in criss-crossed brown-terracotta plaid, constantly hitched up in
Branagh’s case, with only a hint of colour: a grey realm, given to dark
things, such as witches (the three here certainly ghoulish and
intermittently effective, but hyperactive at the expense of the words),
or falcons killed by mousing owls - in a superb scene between reliable
Ross (Norman Bowman, whose well-rehearsed speaking with Steven Cree’s
unusually battle-hardened Lennox early on helped get the show
motoring) and the Old Man (John Shrapnel). Shrapnel, still one of the finest verse speakers
on the English stage today, Shrapnel - with stage credits as long as
your arm (an RSC Claudius is one), has a bigger old man role. Two in
fact; once as a long-suffering, ancient Seyton, not really apt for the
tyrant’s henchman (who surely ought to be played with a hunchback; I
remember Edward Hardwicke as a particularly villainous incarnation);
more importantly, as the hapless but poetic Duncan (‘There's no art / To
find the mind's construction in the face…’). The real Duncan, elected king, was not so much a hallowed old codger in 1040 A.D. as a 39 year old still in his prime, some four years older than his cousin and rival; and relevantly he, like Macbeth, claimed descent from Malcolm II through not the paternal line but their mothers, and actually died unwisely attacking Moray, his commander, Macbeth’s own fiefdom. Shrapnel supplies everything the malicious
Shakespeare, eager in 1606-7 (when it was written; it was staged before
James I later, in 1611) to court ‘legitimate’ Scottish royalty, wants of
Duncan: crisp-spoken, clean-living nobility; a mutually backscratching
respect for the Scottish aristocracy (one of the many lines Macbeth
crosses); purity; and pathos. We actually see this honest Duncan die,
significantly, in the candlelit chancel that hallows the halls Branagh
is in process of polluting. Religion, like everything else, haunts this
Macbeth. Even as he moves on to the next bumping-off, unlike for Richard
Plantagenet, his conscience is a killer. It is as if he, not she, should do the sleep
walking scene (an intermittently powerful Macbeth Frau from Alex
Kingston, who once charmed the Midlands as Birmingham Rep's Desdemona
opposite Jeffrey Kissoon; one of her best cynical lines was ‘When in
swinish sleep Their drenched natures lie, as in a death’; and best of
all, ‘If we should fail, -’ ‘We fail’). Their scene together
after the killing was an absolute high point. There are other good performances, and even
vignettes. One of the best, apart from Vlahos’s Malcolm, a shrewd match
for Fearon’s Macduff, is Daniel Ings’s cocky – and inventive - Porter:
great fun, terrifically enacted across an organ lift-like platform at
one end, out of which the Witches have their brilliant and terrifying
first entry, where Banquo’s ghost latterly skulks, and through whose
slats Austin achieves astonishing, rapier-like lighting effects. Ings’s
imagined equivocators, English tailors and co. are all wonderfully
conjured, heads and arms and other limbs spasmodically drooping over: a
bit like a better parody of the Witches’ disappointingly prop-free
manoeuvrings. The succubi that are best managed are those of
Banquo’s, or Fleance’s offspring (Patrick Neil Doyle, a charmingly
musical, strumming young laird): emerging from a kind of disgusting
uterus of infernal muck and mud, and parading down the galley gangway
with the moral sneer of Crookback’s censuring Bosworth apparitions. If Fearon’s Macduff (he is certainly a force: the RSC's Othello, Pericles, Romeo and Mark Anthony) brings purging sanity, not so much his ‘Horror, horror…’, but his outburst at the news from Fife, is astonishing: a visceral outpouring like a West African wake. That scene itself is one of the best defined in
the play: Rosalie Craig’s Lady Macduff, exquisite in conversation with
her sophisticated little son (shades of Arthur and Hubert, perhaps), and
uttering to her killers that crucial word ‘unsanctified’, a Leitmotif
of this Branagh production, which itself begins with Vespers bell and
plainsong.
A treat of the nightmare Fife scene is the
speaking, and the performing of the surprisingly seasoned boy actor
Harry Polden (quite a find as the boy in ENO’s recent Wozzeck,
and sharing the role with Pip Pearce): ‘Then the liars and swearers are
fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men, and
hang them up.’ Delicious; and Master Macduff is as delicious in demise
as in life (long, gurgling, gut-wrenching ends being an Ashford-Branagh
speciality). Siward (David Annen) has track record as well as
potential, but deserved to be a doubled role. His heir Osbjorn (Young
Siward: Harry Lister Smith; historically it was his nephew who was
called Siward), earlier one of the victims of Ings’s bizarre doorman,
looks too pretty to have a close-quarters chance: and duly gives Branagh,
whose double blade and broadsword swordsmanship under Terry King’s
direction is unnervingly impressive, scope to remind us of his not yet
waned prowess (his foe Siward père, survived but a year after
this Scottish escapade). The fact that Malcolm has been dubbed by Duncan,
Duke of Cumberland recalls two things: that England’s North Western tip
was once Scottish; and that the expansive Siward, who ruled from
Yorkshire to Northumberland and from about now Huntingdonshire and
Northamptonshire too, was an (at that point) friendly neighbour.
Intervening to save thrones was part of his agenda: he was crucial in
not just unseating Macbeth, but outmanoeuvring Edward the Confessor’s
Wessex rival. Godwin.
But it is Branagh’s speaking that seals him as an
outstanding Macbeth: if, that is, treating some of Shakespeare’s best
lines as bits of garrulity to be pattered off almost unnoticed is not a
sin (‘Will plead like angels trumpet-tongu’d’, . . . ‘And
wither’d murder, Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, . . . Moves like a
ghost’; ‘Hear it not Duncan . . .’). He does the weak man incredibly well. ‘We will
speak further’ is classic procrastination; He is very much prepared to
live a coward in his own esteem. These ‘terrible dreams That shake us
nightly’ are as real as ‘scorpions’ that afflict his mind. With ‘I dare
do all that may become a man’ he clings to a humanity that she, and
ambition, are python-like squeezing out of him. But where Branagh triumphs here time and again is
by finding lines we almost never hear, individual words that normally
weep unnoticed, and polishing them to lend them fresh import. ‘Be
innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck’ he fills with import. He can
take ‘The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums’ or one of those
troublingly attenuated couplets, ‘The crow Makes wing to the rooky wood;
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse’, and turn them in to
quotes you would put on a par with daggers, heaven’s cherubim and all. ‘The time has been my senses would have cool’d To
hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise
rouse and stir As life were in it’ was one lesser-known cluster that
came out clear as a bell, the quavering voice whistling from one emotion
to another. ‘For it hath cow’d my better part of man: And be these
juggling fiends no more believ’d, That palter with us in a double
sense;’ was another: the poor tyrant may have lost his wits, but never
his verse speaking. Branagh doesn’t change clothes throughout the
play; nor, mostly, did any of the others (Duncan may have been an
exception). It must have been a smelly Pictish place, 11th
century Scotland. Perhaps such luxuries were reserved for the Church. We
don’t see a prebend during this show (the Doctor, attending Banquo’s
banquet in skullcap attire, is a kind of makeshift). Nor do we perhaps
know how far the church, like Russian Orthodoxy, played along and gave
its blessing to its new rulers, Macbeth or Malcolm. Macbeth, like other
well-born youths, was educated at a Christian monastery; like his Norse
cousin or nephew from Orkney, did, in fact, make a largesse-filled
pilgrimage to Rome. That’s an idea some future production might pick up. But a revival of that opening plainsong (to mourn
the Queen’s death, and gutter out at ‘Out, out, brief candle . . .’ -
one of Branagh’s supreme moments in the whole play) might have helped
underline the paradox - of eternal good and temporal bad - that this so
often shiveringly good and surprising production seeks openly and
subliminally to address. There was no revelation at the end, no Seyton
restored or triumphing as Duncan’s ghost, just one more corpse - and
Macbeth’s head in a sack here, no match for Greek Tragedy, seemed a bit
naff. But then it’s the moment we dread, when all the fun and all the
entertainment is silenced. Unflinching homicide he may be, but as Sir
Ken adroitly and searingly and mischievously reminds us, MacBheatha mac
Fhionnlaig, Mormaer of Moray, the ‘Red King’, High King of Scotland, is
always endless fun. No wonder, as pi Malcolm leads Scotland into the
English sway (a situation his flighty brother Donalbain, Elliot Balchin,
would later redress) we miss him so badly at the close. Roderic Dunnett
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He shows no ability to forge alliances, except with those who prove
political minnows. He has no relations with Siward, thus leaving the
English alliance open to the particularly memorable Malcolm (Alexander
Vlahos, a heartthrob Mordred in BBC TV’s Merlin), who turns the escapee
princeling into something at least as politically astute as Henry Tudor
in Richard III (Branagh’s last UK stage foray into Shakespeare
was famously also not in London, but at the Sheffield Crucible). 
The
Doctor (Benny Young, very Scottish delivery) was as impressive as the
good Lady, whose lines I found less troubling than usual in the
sleepwalking scene; and Katie West, whose more daring early credits
include Jo (A Taste of Honey) for the Sheffield Crucible, was a
delectable snooded acolyte, pottering up and down on Queenly errands.
The Murderers, too (three, to match the Witches: Stuart Neal, Jordan
Dean, and the ineluctable Ings), deserve mention: not especially
defined, but thoroughly up to it.