Macbeth 2004

February - April 2004

This production transferred to the Barbican's Pit Theatre, running in repertory there with The Changeling from 23rd September to 23rd October. 

Macbeth (Gyuri Sarossy) and Lady Macbeth (Zoe Aldrich)

Director’s Note

Macbeth stands with King Lear at the centre of Shakespeare’s work - the twin pillars of his tragic vision and the greatest account we have of what it is to be a man (to be a male, but also to be of humankind).  But though both plays are imaginatively and emotionally demanding, they are not (as they have often been characterised) either despairing or cynical. Certainly they stand in sharp contrast to the early ‘festive’ comedies – to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It in particular – where the forces of Nature, for all that they might be found mischievous and trying, ultimately prove benign.  In the great tragedies Nature is terrifying indeed, never more so than when its forces are gathered in chaotic and cruel humanity, fed by fear, ambition, avarice or lust. Lear’s stupidity in dividing his kingdom into three releases energies in his family that almost destroy England. Lady Macbeth’s determination that her man will be crowned leads Scotland similarly near to the precipice – to the rolling back of the civil state, to the near-complete destruction of that complex of conventions, mutual trusts and obligations, and the rule of law, which we term civilisation. Where the vision is at its toughest and most shocking is in the sense that humane society, goodness itself, is never ‘safe’ (a word crucial to Macbeth), but must be constantly rediscovered and remade – and that these renewals will often be achieved at the eleventh hour, for only then will good men dig deep to fight for what they value and believe. The gentle Duke of Albany and the untested Edgar, in Lear; the thanes of Ross, Lenox and Menteith and the young Malcolm in Macbeth all make this difficult journey.  But they do come through. Shakespeare is clear, too, that the temporary triumph of evil brings neither joy nor content.  The psyches that annex these destructive forces are tormented, restless and needy.  Shakespeare is a master at the dramatisation of loss, and of the loneliness that accompanies wilful, selfish destruction.  He also excels in those brief but eloquent touches of humanity – sometimes carelessly, or deliberately, banished from productions of Macbeth – that render the evil that threatens them shrill and unenviable. Andrew Hilton

Cast

1st Witch / Gentlewoman Rebecca Smart
2nd Witch / Lady Macduff Saskia Portway
3rd Witch / Lady Macbeth Zoe Aldrich (Barbican)
King Duncan John Nicholas
Malcolm Tom Espiner
Donalbain / Doctor Jamie Ballard
A Sergeant / Murderer Chris Donnelly
Ross David Collins
Angus Dan Winter
Macbeth Gyuri Sarossy
Banquo Rupert Ward Lewis
Lenox Tom Sherman, Ben Tolley (Bristol)
Servant / Young Siward Richard Corgan (Barbican)
Macduff Jonathan Nibbs
Fleance Felix Lehane/Ben Scobie
Porter Roland Oliver
Seyton Matthew Thomas
Siward Paul Nicholson
Menteith Alex MacLaren
Young Macduff James Hilton/Michael Smith
Violinist Lou Jeffrey
Cellist Juliet McCarthy

PRODUCTION

Director Andrew Hilton
Set & Costume Designer Andrea Montag
Set Redesign (Barbican) Vicki Cowan Ostersen 
Edition Dominic Power
Composer / Sound Designer Elizabeth Purnell
Lighting Designer Paul Towson
Costume Supervisors Jane Tooze (Bristol)
                           Kate Whitehead (Barbican)
Sound Designer Dan Jones
Fight Director Kate Waters
Fight Captain Tom Sherman
Voice Coach Gary Owston
Researcher Katie Knowles
Production Photographer Alan Moore

Production Managers Clive Stevenson (Bristol)
                         Adam Carree (Barbican)
Technical Stage Manager Christian Wallace (Bristol)
Technician Matt Roper (Bristol)
Stage Managers Hazel Doherty & Pauline Skidmore
Assistant Stage Manager Jayne Byrom (Barbican)
Costumes made by Bristol Costume Services

Reviews

The Guardian 
 February 9th 2004
* * *
Andrew Hilton is a plain Shakespearean cook, but you can afford to be plain when your ingredients are of the finest quality: insightful acting even in the smallest roles, excellent verse speaking, clear story-telling, an intimate setting and a good eye for detail. Hilton's Macbeth has all these qualities, and it deserves to be heading to the Barbican later this year where it will fill with no difficulty one of the gaps left by the reckless departure of the RSC.
  There is a hunger for Shakespeare that treats both play and audience with respect and refuses to impose directorial concept. In Gyuri Sarossy's performance you see a decent man corrupted, a man who struggles before evil gets the upper hand. The murder of Banquo seems all the more terrible because of the brief but real flash of affection that Macbeth has for him early on. Sarossy's Macbeth isn't a man who just snuffs out the stars, he suffocates his own humanity.
  There are other good things, too - such as the entwining of sex and death in the relationship of Macbeth and Zoe Aldrich's cool, young Lady Macbeth. It may be merely to save on another salary, but Aldrich's doubling as a witch suggests a heart that has already let evil take root. Not that these witches are of the magical variety, rather they look like ordinary village women. They have the resentment of those who have been poor too long.
  The absence of the supernatural means the production lacks atmosphere, and it takes things at far too leisurely a pace. But Hilton juxtaposes innocence and horror to good effect throughout, from the murderous Macbeths behaving like conspiratorial children in their night-gowns, to the image of a young child gravely offering his hand to the man who will murder him. Lyn Gardner

The Independent 
 2nd March 2004
* * *
THERE ARE a lot of things you can do to Shakespeare – most of them bad. For actors, the standard trap is to slip into meaningless declamation: sound and fury signifying nothing. Directors, on the other hand, are apt to try to put their mark on the Bard by introducing a concept, be it a post-apocalyptic Macbeth or a sci-fi Romeo and Juliet set in a galaxy far, far away. It is odd that although he is generally held to be our finest playwright, the one thing that few people do with Shakespeare is trust him – and the audience’s intelligence – enough to stage his plays without gimmicks or hooks.
  In the slightly shabby venue that gives the group its name, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory stage Shakespeare – pure and simple. Not an auteur director’s take on Shakespeare. Not a star name’s personalised performance of Shakespeare. Simply the refreshing purity of Shakespeare’s words and story, delivered with no bells, whistles or high-minded palliatives.
  Just as a picture-restorer strips away centuries of dirt and nicotine to reveal the glowing colours of the original work underneath, so the director Andrew Hilton picks away the fancies and fetishes that are so often attached to Shakespeare, to leave a freshly minted text, set on a neutral backdrop of directorial restraint and craftsmanlike acting. This enables the onlooker to use their own imagination and to (re)discover that in terms of pacing and dramatic structure Shakespeare wrote less like today’s playwrights and more like contemporary TV and movie scriptwriters.  It is when the play is stripped down to the bare text performed on bare boards that the true timelessness of the drama in Macbeth leaps out most clearly.
  That is not to say that this is a bland and featureless staging. But the touches that it adds are subtle enhancements. Macbeth and his wife (Gyuri Sarossy and Zoë Aldrich) do not need a plasma TV, his’n’hers video mobiles and a chrome cappuccino maker in their kitchen for us to recognise them as an ambitious executive couple caught up in the heady adrenalin rush of climbing the corporate ladder. Jonathan Nibbs’s Macduff is a pleasantly prissy homebody, not natural hero material but a man driven into the hurly-burly of bloodstained politics by the atrocities perpetrated on him by Macbeth. And Rupert Ward-Lewis’s Banquo has a praetor-natural stillness even in life, as if the mark of death is on him from the start.
  Now in its fifth season, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory still offers the perfect opportunity for anyone put off by Shakespeare by a bad past experience to see his work in an unadulterated form and discover why his fans rave about him. And for those already persuaded of his brilliance, it offers the chance to see how much more brilliant he is when his work is not being staged by people trying to dazzle the punters with their own rays of light. Toby O’Connor Morse