PATRICK MASON'S new, production of Shakespeare's richest melodrama; deservedly drew sustained applause at the final curtain from its attentive opening night audience: it is an elegant and intelligent interpretation of the text, toweringly staged in Joe Vanek's fortress setting, which opens up partially, when required, to suggest (in what looks like a great urban, alleyway) blasted heaths and battlefields in which witches and soldiers are masterfully and energetically deployed.
But, almost as if the director - were trying to eschew the melodramatic elements of the drama, it ultimately lacks the blood and the guts and frenzy which are necessary if the primary characters are to be allowed to express fully the emotional and superstitious madness which leads them down their mightily destructive track.
Des McAleer's Macbeth - a beautifully controlled performance which too tightly constrains the moral turmoil within the ambition driving the man comes across more as a calculating business mogul than as a blood stained monarch. And Andrea Irvine's Lady Macbeth, after the initial effective assertion of her murderous ambition to achieve the power and position promised to her husband by the witches, becomes more wimpish than demented. Both of them, however, establish with great economy of movement their driving mutual sexual attraction, which makes their murderous scheme plausible.
Other characters find it more difficult to establish emotional depth and Joan O'Clery's almost universally grey costumes make it more than usually difficult for the audience to establish (with a text that refers with less than adequate frequency to their names) just who is who in any encounter. Clive Geraghty's Duncan is clear and forthright, yet Darragh Kelly's Malcolm lacks vocal and emotional substance. Stephen Hogan's Macduff reaches emotional heights on receipt of the murder of his wife and children, yet is otherwise as grey as the rest. Des Cave's Banquo seems almost sturdier in his ghostly appearances at the banquet than when earlier fleshed out.
The overall production concept, illuminated by deliberate and conflicting anachronisms, render the play suitably timeless. But the concentration on the sense of the words and an unevenness in both the emotional expression of the characters and (in some performances) the rhythmic and poetic expression of the lines leave it a mite bloodless. But the intelligence of the interpretation, the style of the production and the concentration on the narrative thrust of the drama (despite a lapse in narrative drive after the interval) render this a staging well worth seeing.
