Macbeth and the fourth witch

Three productions of Shakespeare in one summer are remarkable for this country, particularly as two of them were by professional companies.

Hannah McPake, as well as Gareth Fordred’s Macbeth, are easily at their best in the scene following Duncan’s offstage murder

Last week’s production of Macbeth (Neptune courtyard, The Palace, Valletta) was a TNT Theatre Britain travelling production directed by Paul Stebbings whose aim is to make the tragedy, one familiar to so many former and present students in Malta, visually gripping to the audience.

He does this despite a cast so small that the banquet scene is performed without a single guest on the stage, and the battle scenes towards the end hardly deserve to be described as skirmishes.

Stebbings has very wisely chosen to retain the play’s medieval setting which is essential to make us understand the violent struggle between kings and those aspiring to take their place and the great belief informing the play about the influence of the supernatural on human actions.

His handling of the Weird Sisters, the witches, is notable. The sisters he presents are not the conventional malevolent creatures they are often made to represent, but manifestations of “a powerful force that enforces the law of nature”.

They are thus morally neutral creatures attracted by what is evil in Macbeth’s Scotland to lose temporarily their nature and become mischievous, a nature they recover at the end of the play when Macbeth dies and the virtuous Malcolm is crowned. Their costumes have a leafy, tree-like aspect.

This concept is not easily understood without a reading of the director’s note, and this is unsatisfactory in any kind of production.

Shakespeare clearly believed in forces of evil external to human beings, and in this play evil becomes dominant in Scotland when the generous and merciful King Duncan is murdered by Macbeth who then wins his crown.

Stebbings makes a weak gesture towards depicting a struggle between Christianity and paganism by showing us Duncan signing himself with the cross and praying, on one hand, and Macbeth stopping half way in making the sign of the cross, on the other.

The witches in this production are always present when a bad deed is being planned or carried out, and Lady Macbeth has a secret spiritual connection with them, actually preparing a spell just before Macbeth’s first crucial meeting with her.

Lady Macbeth is sometimes regarded as a fourth witch and the double casting in this production of Hannah McPake as both Lady Macbeth and one of the witches ties up with this view.

This approach works well until the murder of Duncan, but makes little sense in the rest of the play where Lady Macbeth is clearly guilt-ridden and becomes an anxious wife who tries to restrain Macbeth’s murderous instincts.

In the banquet scene she becomes truly hysterical, so Stebbings clearly wishes us to see the scene as the one in which her mind begins to give way.

McPake’s Lady Macbeth is above all a woman in love with her husband and determined to help him reach glory. Despite her spells, and despite her invocation to the powers of evil to be invaded by the spirit of cruelty, she never makes your blood run cold, mainly because her lines lack the intensity they need to make the character reach her malignant height.

She, as well as Gareth Fordred’s Macbeth, are easily at their best in the scene following Duncan’s offstage murder, McPake’s coolness and ability to think fast strongly counter-pointing Fordred’s utter panic and terrified hallucinations about a voice cursing him with insomnia for the rest of his life. This is a strong scene, surely the most successful in the production.

Fordred does not have the heroic voice needed by the part, but he has some feeling for the poetry of the great soliloquies. I noted with interest his handling of the “If it were done when ’tis done”, beginning with a confidential tone addressed to the audience and then changing to a fearful tone as he reminds himself of Duncan’ goodness.

He plays the last scenes following the cauldron scene (a scene much less effective than in many other productions I have seen) and especially after Lady Macbeth’s death, as a man demoralised and with much too little anger at the way fate is turning against him.

Stebbings is surely right when he describes the last part of the play as being imperfect, and, in fact, it can come across, as it does in this production, as very bitty.

I am surprised that the many cuts in the text made by Stebbings did not include a much more substantial cut in the Malcolm/Macduff scene than he made.

The scene itself must stand, of course, for its motivation of Macduff’s resolve to have his revenge on Macbeth. Roger Clark, in the part, plays his reaction to the news of his family’s slaughter by Macbeth with admirable skill. I found it mildly amusing, however, to hear this American actor use the American pronunciation of “news” as “noos”.

David Chittenden is a dignified Banquo, his suspicions of Macbeth kept tightly in rein.

The porter’s scene, the tragedy’s only comic one, is stretched out with a good deal of ribald behaviour by the porter (Eric Tessier-Lavigne) and his girlfriend (not a character in the text, of course).

While Shakespeare wrote the scene to bring the audience down from the infernal scenes preceding it to ordinary life, I doubt if he intended this break to be so long and so coarse.