Neglecting magic and fear leads `Macbeth' into farce

WE are so used to thinking of Macbeth as a great play that it takes an unsuccessful production such as Patrick Mason's at the Abbey to remind us if has a difficult kind of greatness, a grudging and perverse magnificence, that will not yield itself up to mere competence or cleverness.

I have often wondered whether the play has acquired its status as the touchstone of absurd thespian superstition merely because of a few ancient accidents, or whether the fear of the play does not derive from a more mundane understanding of how easy it is to get wrong.

The cruelty of the play is that even with a good, professional production it can tip over so easily into bathos and farce.

The problem is that Macbeth simply doesn't play by the rules. Imagine for a moment that you are young and that you want to be a playwright or a screenwriter. You would reckon that there are certain basic rules of drama and you might set about learning what they are.

You would be told, for instance, that good drama is largely about motivation, about showing the roots of the actions that take place on stage in the characters of the protagonists, about effects and their causes. You would be told that you have to build towards a climax, that your ending would have to resolve the accumulated tensions of the action. If, say, your main character was a general who killed his king, a nice old man who had been kind to him, you would have to be pretty clear about why he did it.

And then imagine that you pick up Macbeth, a play that has been around for nearly 400 years as a keystone of the theatre. You would be very confused indeed. You would find not only that there is no very good reason why the general kills the king, but that the playwright has gone to great pains to make the action illogical.

He has provided the general with a prophecy that he will become Thane of Cawdor and king. He has shown him becoming, indeed, Thane of Cawdor without lifting a finger. It is entirely irrational that he should therefore decide that he has to do something to make himself king. He himself knows this and tells us so. But he does it.

And most things in the play go wrong, not just by accident but by deliberately perverse design. Macbeth, for instance, needs, in order to survive, to kill Banquo's son and Macduff. He manages to kill Banquo and Macduff's son. The witches' prophecies come true, but in the most bizarre and unlikely ways walking woods, motherless men. Time and again, the plot seems much closer to farce than to tragedy purposes mistook, spectacular incompetence, stupid misunderstandings. Not for nothing is Ubu Roi, the progenitor of The Goons and Monty Phyton, a version of Macbeth. One tilt and this great epic of power and evil slides into absurd comedy.

Sadly, there are times in Patrick Mason's production when the tragedy does slide into farce. The scene of Banquo's ghost, for instance, is so close to being a low parody that you wonder whether it isn't actually being played for laughs, with Des McAleer's Macbeth behaving like a man who has just found a condom in his soup rather than one who is confronted in the midst of a ceremonial celebration of his kingship with the reality behind his power.

THIS is sad because the production does have much to commend it. The staging is excellent. It is brilliantly designed by Joe Vanek, and perfectly paced by Patrick Mason. Stylistic problems such as those of the so called soliloquies are handled intelligently. Individual scenes, such as the murder of Lady Macduff, are clear and moving. Derry Power's Porter is very funny, and his satiric barbs are cleverly modernised.

What it lacks, though are the two things that give the play its epic weight and its illogical coherence a sense of ritual and a great Macbeth. The lack of surface structures of cause and effect in the play don't matter so long as its deeper structures of good and evil are successfully dramatised. The play more than any of the other tragedies, happens through images drawn from a visceral underworld of magic and fear the witches, the ghost, the unborn children that haunt Macbeth. And this production fails completely to animate any of those images. The witches are irrelevant. The ghost provokes giggles rather than gasps. The crucial scene is which Macbeth returns to the witches and is faced with three apparitions is funked.

This absence leaves Des McAleer's Macbeth trying to make a coherent character from a purposefully incoherent text. And the only way to do it is to reduce Macbeth, to make him into a soulless thug, a jumped up night club bouncer on the make. All the unspoken ambiguity, all the luminous vitality that should surround Macbeth is missing. He is so straightforward, even dull, at the start, that we get no sense of his diminution at the end. Having no greatness to lose he cannot give us a sense of loss.

And without that sense of loss everything else in the play comes to seem excessive, overwrought bathetic. At times, the bathos becomes indistinguishable from parody, grand words with no grand truths behind them. That is the last thing that should ever happen with Shakespeare.