In which it is an incredibly difficult play to stage effectively

I just got in from seeing Ace Production’s version MacBeth at Kamani. It was a one night performance as part of the Bharat Rang Mahotsav festival that’s going on for the next couple weeks.

Now, I’ve seen quite a bit of Shakespeare in my day. On various stages at Stratford, university theatres, and parks. I’ve seen numerous people perform scene studies and monologues from various plays. Without hesitation, I can say that tonight’s production of MacBeth is *easily* the worst presentation of Shakespearian text I’ve ever seen. If you’ve seen some of the scene studies I’ve seen, then you can imagine *just* how bad it was.

Before I go into details, I’d like to mention that the company spent six months working on this steaming pile of shit. The director (Alyque Padamsee, who also played Duncan) has been working in theatre for half a century and has directed a number of great titles (including a Hindi Marat/Sade) and won some awards. I guess, in some cases, no amount of experience can make you good at your job.

In order to cut the show down to two hours, large chunks of text were cut out. Which meant anything resembling comedy, making the story continuously dark and evil. I missed the drunken porter speech until I realized that, in performance, it would have been a man staggering about with his mouth open. I missed MacDuff’s speech at the end. I mean, it *ends* the play for Christ’s sake.

All of the actors spoke in British accents, which is apparently the easiest way to make an Indian speaking English understood. Quite frankly, I preferred hearing the actors who maintained a semblance of their natural accent. It was just as easy to understand them (most of the time). Regardless, every last actor was terrible. I won’t get into detail. Just imagine the worst possible way you couple play each character and then magnify that by three. I could deal with Lady MacDuff, she played her one scene in a way that made you think she had an idea of what she was talking about.

Oh, I will mention the witches, since they’re always worth mentioning. The premise was that Lady MacBeth was a Tantrika who conjures up the three witches and creates a self-fufilling prophecy to make MacBeth king (which was shown as the start of the play). A very interesting idea……. if it had been carried through the entire play as opposed to just the opening. The witches were played by three men (including the one white guy in the cast), which was an interesting choice. Their costumes were long, black, raggedy, flowing, and pretty cool. They each wore wigs and half masks styled to look like ugly wrinkled faces. Their voices were amplified and distorted for effect, but the levels were too loud. They attempted to writhe in a spooky way that was just embarassing to watch. They used (what are probably) symbolic hand gestures that were basically metal-fists. The writhing and the hand gestures combined with the black costumes and long wigs made them look like aging headbangers. Yikes.

Subtext? It didn’t exist. The titular hero said every line with great resonance and arrogance, and his wife was no different. The sleepwalking scene (in which Lady M dripped snot everywhere) got pretty good halfway through, but that’s nowhere near good enough. All of the characters were flat, reciting the lines with no idea why they were saying those words. The soliloquies? Yikes. Just yikes.

Blocking? No motivation behind movements or actions except to create nice photo ops. A great deal of “Shakespeare Hands”. A lot of walking partway up flights of stairs simply to use the stairs. The swordfights (and knife murders) were horrific to watch in the sense that these men had no idea

The design was equally terrible. Lighting here seems to only consist of parcans and therefore only consists of general area lighting. Unfortunately, the areas didn’t overlap, and the actors apparently don’t know how to find their light. There was also a follow spot operator with a shaky hand. Original music was composed by Louis Banks, who seems to be a man who *loves* his synths. In his defense, the basic musical leitmotif for the witches was pretty cool until the rest of the music kicked in. Costumes: basic, not enough variety. I really hated the plastic Halloween crowns for the royals. The set was a series of stone-painted flats with arched doorways and stairs on either side. Stairs that clearly went nowhere. The middle section was a stone-painted scrim which would reveal the witches with the ghost of Banquo, wrapping Lady M in a shroud, or simply gyrating with their metal fists in the air. The scrim was a good idea. Too bad you could see the seams between the panels. The scrim was also used for projections which was awful until they showed a fight scene through a video of woods rushing past.

MacBeth’s head on a stick was a beautiful prop. Really well done. Part of me was hoping that it was the real actor’s head. It was that realistic.

I keep thinking about the scene study from MacBeth that Brendan and Michelle did. I believe they were both 20 (21 tops) when they performed it for our class after only a couple of weeks of rehearsal time. It was wonderful and brilliant and slightly incandescent. Comparing their performance to the car accident I watched tonight, I think Canadian theatre will have a very happy future. As for Indian theatre...... fuck...... it was *so* bad.

I will *never* recover from how bad that play was. Never.