Macbeth At The Stratford Festival
I saw Robert Lepage’s production of Macbeth at Stratford’s Avon Theatre and I came out humming the scenery.
If you saw his Coriolanus at Stratford or Kà, still playing in Las Vegas, you know that Lepage is a visual artist of considerable genius and one of the best theatrical magicians working today. He and Ariane Sauvé, in collaboration with Ex Machina, are credited with the sets, props, and effects. They are all spectacular.
He has chosen to set Macbeth amidst the bloody 1990s biker wars in Quebec although the sets and costumes have little about them that says “Quebec.” The bits of signage on the sets are in English for starters and the black leather biker outfits seem pretty generic.
The concept, however, allows him to create scenes and effects that are occasionally puzzling but seldom less than impressive.
Consider the opening scene that follows the totally unnecessary movie-like credit sequence. In the dead of night a small motorboat chugs across the unseen surface of a lake. A bound and hooded figure slumps amidship. The boat stops, one biker cuts off the victim’s gang colors from his leather jacket while the other fixes a chain to a heavy cement block. The block is heaved overboard dragging the helpless victim after.
The boat departs and we see the victim, bubbles of breath floating upwards, descend into the depths from above. It’s an absolutely chilling image, but who is this guy?
.
Is it Macdonaldwald whom Macbeth has “unseamed from the nave to the chaps”? Or perhaps the traitorous Thane of Cawdor whose execution paved the way for Macbeth’s rise? It’s impossible to tell because Lepage has cut the scene that might contain the answer.
What would a biker gang be without its motorcycles? All the major characters have their chopped hogs. Not real ones, of course, but electric bikes tricked out to look like Harleys, the roaring engines provided by John Gzowski’s sound design.
It’s a lot of fun seeing them roar across the set, circle around and come to a stop outside Macbeth’s castle. At first. But there’s so much mounting, riding, and dismounting that it becomes tedious and tends to slow the action to a crawl at times.
Macbeth’s “castle” is envisioned as a down-market, two-level motel that’s seen better days. Lepage uses four immense set pieces to create this location. They are pushed and spun around by a small army of black-clad stage hands who, like bunraku puppeteers, maneuver them into various configurations that provide different perspectives. It’s all incredibly impressive but also tends to slow the pace.
Lepage has created an absolutely ingenious pyrotechnic effect at the top of the second act that earns a well deserved laugh and round of applause from the audience. Whether it serves the play or not is another matter.
Oh, yes. The play. I almost forgot. Hidden in all this razzle-dazzle is a play by William Shakespeare called Macbeth that peeks through every now and again.
Well, what’s left of a play at any rate. It seems that so much time is taken up with moving scenery and revving up motorcycles that big swaths of text have had to be sacrificed. And Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies to begin with!
When he turns his attention to Shakespeare, Lepage has only intermittent success.
One of his more successful conceits is to envision the three weird sisters as drug-ravaged tranny hookers. It works quite well, especially in the scene where the witches dig through garbage bins to assemble the ingredients for their evil potion.
The last time Stratford mounted Macbeth, in 2016, director Antoni Cimolino cast young and sexy actors as the two leads. Lepage’s Macbeth (Tom McCamus) and Lady Macbeth (Lucy Peacock) are decidedly middle-aged. That makes Macbeth’s command that his wife should “bring forth men-children only” seem a bit delusional. But their age adds an understandable desperation to Lady M’s fevered insistence that her husband claw his way to the top.
Of the two, Peacock is the more successful. She brings a smoldering sexuality to her relationship with her biker king. Arresting, too, is her take on the famous sleepwalking scene, which she underplays to excellent effect.
McCamus’s Macbeth seems rather unfocused, although he is among the more successful in the cast at making Shakespeare’s text understandable.
Maria Vacratsis, as the gender-swapped porter, is terrific, perhaps the most successful portrayal in the the play. She is presented as the desk clerk and general factotum of Macbeth’s motel. Lepage has made the canny decision to give the lines of minor characters, who have been eliminated, to the porter, further rounding out her position as a key functionary at the “castle.”
Of the others, Banquo (a hunky Graham Abbey), Macduff (a splendidly bearded Tom Rooney), Ross (André Sills), and Malcolm (Austin Eckert) are less successful. For one thing, the cut scenes and speeches deny them an opportunity to grow into their characters. But there are other problems.
Perhaps the most surprising and disheartening aspect of the performance is that many of the actors are hard to understand, even seasoned pros. Whole chunks of scenes come across the footlights as random babble.
All the actors are miked and the sound design seems uneven, muffling the actors’ voices, especially when the actors have to negotiate the cramped spaces of the motel set. I also suspect that short shrift was given during rehearsal to the crucial job of exploring the text.
Stratford’s actors have years of training and experience in the art of speaking iambic pentameter. When that skill is combined with a deep understanding of what every word means – to the character – and the motivation for speaking those words, Shakespeare’s text can sound perfectly contemporary. I found that missing more often than not.
The rest is a mix of the good and not so good. Gzowski’s cinematic score is quite effective, as is the lighting by Kimberly Purtell. The mylar scrim that allows the weird sisters and Banquo’s ghost to appear and then vanish works well, but it serves as a mirror for those downstage of it. As a result when the scrim is in use the downstage members of the cast all have doppelgängers. Weird.
The fake tattoos on the gang members and Lady M are not only far too sparse but they glow under Purtell’s lighting. In Kà body stockings were used to give some performers elaborate full-body tattoos. Did someone decide they’d already spent too much money?
As negative as this review may sound, I remain a Lepage fan. Visually, his work is never less than fascinating. Over all, his take on Macbeth is kinda fun. A little dark, but fun.
I hold out hope that as the play continues its run, the actors and the coaches the Festival provides will continue the textual work that was neglected in rehearsal. Hopefully, too, the techies at the sound board will work out the kinks in the sound design.
When Shakespeare’s words come through loud, and crisp, and clear and the actors are fully grounded, this Macbeth, despite its flaws, will be quite something to see.
Macbeth continues at the Avon Theatre through November 2, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Stratford Festival website.
Footnote: Macbeth contains my ultimate rebuttal to “Oxfordians” and others who believe the plays of William Shakespeare were written by some upper-class twit at the court. Consider the line “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more.” No one whose lungs weren’t filled with stage dust could conjure an image that bleak.
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One Response
Out, damned critic! out, I say!–One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?
What need we fear who knows it, when Kelly calls our production to account?–Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.