Theater Review: John Doyle directs a rapid-fire Macbeth

Macbeth

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by John Doyle

Starring Corey Stoll and Nadia Bowers

Classic Stage Company, Manhattan

October 30, 2019

Parasite

Written and Directed by Bong Joon-ho

Wow, that was a brisk Macbeth! The play is already a concise one by Shakespeare’s standards with fewer side-plots and subsidiary characters to dilute the playwright’s focus on the sociopathy of Macbeth and his wife, and how they murder the king and violently die. But this bracing version by John Doyle came in at 100 minutes in a single intense act, a short-duration record in my experience. Doyle is known for his creative, scaled-down Broadway revivals of works like Sweeney Todd and Company (where the actors also played orchestral instruments). He brought his principles of conciseness to bear here. There was a minimalist black set with a single Tudor-style balcony. There were minimal cuts to the text, but things were mostly kept moving by the absence of scene changes, moody witch-doings on the heath, and poignant pauses during soliloquies. Movie/TV star Corey Stoll (House of Cards, Homeland) was a New York sociopath, brisk and clipping, and a bit neurotic and sarcastic in his dialogue, yet very aware of the meaning of his words—a very fine performance. Stoll’s wife Nadia Bowers was good but not great as Lady Macbeth. I was never really convinced by her evil descent into madness. Director Doyle compacted the play using only nine actors to play the 16 characters, and relied on their acting talent rather than costume changes to pull off the multiple roles. The cast did so brilliantly, and continued the current trend of gender- and race-blind casting decisions (e.g. King Duncan was played by the outstanding Mary Beth Peil).

So this was a distinctive and charged Macbeth. But I don’t think it really was the right approach for this play. Macbeth lives on the intersection of supernatural and natural, and should feel vaguely unreal. Shakespeare loved exploring evil (socio- or psychopathy, if you will) using the vocabulary available in the sixteenth century. Why do people kill and become evil? While Othello’s Iago is perhaps the most clinically drawn sociopath, and Hamlet explores the psychological pathways in the most modern way, Macbeth considers all possibilities. Is evil demonic possession by spirits? Lady Macbeth implies this at one point, as she ponders murdering the king:

   Come, you spirits
   That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
   And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
   Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
   Stop up the access and passage to remorse

“Spirits that tend on mortal thought” is a wonderful way of saying “the devil made me do it”. Or is evil simple opportunism, grasping for status and riches (as Macbeth does once tantalized by the witches’ prediction that he will be king). Or is it being goaded on by others, as Lady Macbeth does to her husband? In Macbeth Shakespeare provides a nice Tudor era differential diagnosis for evil behavior, and does so by alternating Macbeth’s Freudian-style self-analysis ("Is this a dagger which I see before me….or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”) with spells, witches and spirits.

Director Doyle dispensed with distinct witches altogether, having the massed cast members chant their spooky lines. Is the director adding another precipitant of evil—the pressures or norms of society? As an aside, this is the theme of the currently popular film Parasite by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, which entertainingly mixes farce and tragedy to show how an underclass family co-ops the residence and lifestyle of an upper class family, complete with a Macbeth-style denouement, even including blood on the hands of characters. Mr. Bong seems to agree with director Doyle that society is at least a major root of evil but, appropriate to our era, frames the problem specifically as income disparity. I think this issue would have been such a given in Shakespeare’s time that it was an uncommon theme for him, except for occasional side comments like this one from Pericles:

   Third Fisherman:    Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

   First Fisherman:      Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our        rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale.

   Pericles 2.1.69-70.

Now, back to this Macbeth production. Unfortunately, the rapid-fire pace detracted from the textured overlay of these elements that makes Macbeth so unique. Removing the atmospheric, swaying witches not only deprived the play of its most distinctive element, but altered the pacing, so the whole thing came across as an episode of Law and Order, but without the whodunnit aspect. Evil takes time to explicate—the extended rantings of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs serves real dramatic purpose—and this Macbeth lacked those times for reflection. I left bewildered at why Macbeth did what he did, and had to provide all the reflection myself by rereading parts of the play when I got home. Oddly, while the rapid pace should have made the crescendo to the final carnage more dramatic, it actually detracted from it, making it more trivial somehow. So while Doyle’s brisk Macbeth made for an exciting experience, and I would love to see Stoll again in other roles, it was not a particularly satisfying immersion into Shakespeare’s occult-psychologic cauldron.