Macbeth (Alex Austin) has been given a prophecy that, on top of his current title of Thane of Glamis, he will also be given the honour of Thane of Cawdor. When the victorious army next assemble, he finds out that this prediction has come true.
But the next part of the prophecy said he'd be king, and the current monarch Duncan (Daniel Hawksford) is still alive and likely to remain so for a while. Egged on by his wife, Macbeth kills the king, and by chance the heir apparent Malcolm (Bella Aubin) becomes prime suspect and flees the country. The Macbeths are next in line to be king and queen, but his paranoia about the way he got his crown threatens to bring down both him and the country.
I do like a crazy high concept if it comes off, and initially things look promising as Basia Binkowska's designs, which make the soldiers look like a cross between an army and a biker gang, suggests the story's been transposed to a violent gang war. But neither this, nor the inevitable implication that the Macbeths have lost a child, are carried forward, and we end up with a show many of whose scenes feel like they've come out of different productions.
Opening a few scenes into the action then going back is only the start of how Twyman and dramaturg Rikki Henry have made sweeping changes to the text, which at first seem like they might offer up a speedy, twisted version of the story but increasingly look arbitrary. As well as the overall story structure being moved around, various lines pop up in unexpected places, and while the idea of repurposing the "Double, double toil and trouble" spell as a Burns Night toast to a haggis is fun, like many of the rewrites it must be absolutely baffling if you don't already know the play in some detail.
The most consistently confused element is the Weird Sisters, who Twyman can't decide if he even wants on stage. Technically there are none, and their prophecies are just reported back to us, but their lines are regularly delivered by Lady Macduff. Bianca Stephens does a lovely job of showing her being subtly possessed by the supernatural to deliver the witches' messages the first time this happens, but as the play goes on it seems to just conflate the characters without much effort to explain what's going on.
And while the Porter's speech, which the production gives to Sophie Stone's Ross, being delivered to specific audience members feels like exactly what it was written for, it's followed by the most misjudged (voluntary) audience participation, as Austin comes out of character to invite two audience members up on stage to bulk out the diners in the feast scene. So after an excruciating speech that essentially admits the production is very hard to follow, we get what should be one of the tensest scenes in the play completely defused by turning it into awkward comedy. A particular shame because it's one of the few times Will Duke's video designs are used to any real purpose, as Macbeth performs his lines to an empty chair, but on the CCTV footage above their heads a spectral Banquo appears, before Gabriel Akuwudike turns up for real to pour blood into Macbeth's wine glass.
I was sometimes reminded of Polly Findlay's production, although that was infinitely more coherent, but also had a tendency to throw a lot of lovely ideas at the stage without developing them. Here, how Scottish is Twyman's Scotland? There's haggis, a couple of kilts and David Colvin's Lennox plays the bagpipes, but only he and Chimimba are actually Scottish*; the show ends with a suggestion that the military aid from England was actually an attempt to annex Scotland which Malcolm rejects, but if that's not been signalled anywhere else there's little point throwing it in at the literal last minute. And don't ask me if Macbeth is meant to be a lifeguard or a tennis umpire in his high chair in the final scenes, neither would make sense.
I'd say Austin was miscast in the role if I thought any performance could have salvaged this. Macbeth is often played as an emotionally weak man who's too easily pushed around by his wife, but here he's essentially a petulant child who never really develops into anything different after he crosses his moral event horizon. He even borders on Frank Spencer, while as well as the ghost at the feast even the final battle with Ammar Haj Ahmad's Macduff is essentially played for laughs. I've often said Macbeth's popularity can make people overlook how it's one of the easiest Shakespeare plays to get wrong† but here we seem to be avoiding unintentional comedy by making it deliberate.
The only other Shakespeare production I've seen from Twyman was his Othello, which was nothing if not clear in its storytelling, so it's frustrating to have him go so far the other way here, seemingly on purpose: "Seyton" sounds confusingly identical to "Satan" at the best of times, so having Akuwudike wear devil horns to play him seems like a smug in-joke at the expense of anyone who hasn't already seen the play a dozen times. On the way out I heard a woman say to her teenage son "you have to really concentrate to follow Shakespeare, don't you?" a sentiment I've heard before, but only after productions whose storytelling is clear as mud.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare is booking until the 29th of March at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Richard Lakos.
*in fact if it hadn't been for Colvin we'd have had an exact inversion of Max Webster's production, in which Lady Macbeth's was very consciously the only English accent on stage
†I'm fond of the theory that its reputation as a "cursed" play comes not from any disprorportionate amount of onstage accidents, but from the fact that so many otherwise lauded actors got their worst-ever reviews for it
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