MACBETH **
ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGHONE GIANT LEAP ****
CAOL COMMUNITY CENTRE, FORT WILLIAM
FLEETO ****
THE TRON, GLASGOWWHEN it comes to reviving the great plays of William Shakespeare – or any o
ther classic writer – there is just one unbreakable rule. Theatre companies have an absolute obligation – to their audiences, and above all to the play itself – not to tangle with these great texts unless they have some compelling artistic reason to do so; a reason which gives their production a chance of emerging as a work of art in its own right, rather than a routine re-enactment of a familiar text, guaranteed to bore and alienate all but the most committed of audiences.
And it's because it lacks any trace of that passionate, living relationship with the text that Lucy Pitman-Wallace's production of Macbeth, which opens the 2008-09 season at the Royal Lyceum in a major co-production with Nottingham Playhouse, is such a grave disappointment. Pitman-Wallace's main motive, in putting together her production, seems to have been to avoid any facile updating of the story to modern times; and certainly, recent updated productions, such as Out Of Joint's chilling African Macbeth, represent a hard act to follow.
So she sets the play in the kind of school-history version of 11th-century Scotland every child could once recognise; dun-coloured mediaeval costumes, a set evoking the fortified palisade of a castle, kings and queens in little golden crowns sitting on high wooden thrones. As the story begins to unfold, though, it soon becomes clear that, beyond this vague commitment to retro mediaevalism, the production has no other idea to bind it together; and the result is a rag-bag of a show, an increasingly odd combination of the quietly compelling and the embarrassingly inadequate. The always thoughtful Liam Brennan, in the leading role, conducts his own private, pensive, beautifully-articulated love-affair with some of the greatest stage poetry ever written; and some of the other actors – notably Sam Heughan as Malcolm, and Jimmy Chisholm in a range of roles – show a similar exquisite awareness of the power of the verse.
Elsewhere, though, there are moments of vintage coarse Shakespeare and unintentional comedy. The whining, beshrouded witches, for example, are astonishingly amateurish and unfocused; and Lucy Osborne's cramped, cluttered set is ill-conceived beyond words. For the heroic efforts of some key actors, and their sensitivity to the text, this show deserves some respect. But as a new interpretation of what is perhaps the greatest play in the English language, produced jointly by two of the UK's major repertory companies, it completely and dangerously fails to make the grade; and it suggests something seriously wrong with the creative process at both theatres.
The last time Scotland's brilliant children's company Wee Stories tackled Macbeth, they took less than 90 minutes not only to perform a respectable chunk of the play, but also to confront the vexed question of the conditions in which it was written, and the pressure on Shakespeare to produce a version of Scottish history that would flatter the dynastic pretensions of his new monarch, King James VI&I.
So it's joy to discover that Wee Stories' latest community-hall touring show One Giant Leap – co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland – brings the same fierce, unpretentious intellectual energy to bear on the history of humankind's relationship with the stars. The 75-minute tale begins with Wee Stories' usual air of improvised casualness, as Iain Johnstone, as an ordinary postmodern guy facing his 50th birthday, starts to help his son with a school project about the Moon.
It gradually builds, though, into a tremendous small-scale history of ideas; and what emerges is an impassioned 21st-century elegy for the age of enlightenment that traces the relationship between humanity and the heavens from the earliest days of Greece and Rome to the thrilling age of modern scientific investigation which, 40 years ago, finally took men to the Moon, and to the realisation that our jewel-like Earth, as seen from space, represented our best hope of paradise all along.
The script still needs some trimming and stabilising, particularly around its angry, over-verbalised ending. But the simple action – delivered with co-creators Andy Cannon and David Trouton, on a stage full of jumbled books and props – is backed by a dark screen capable of small but startling visual effects. And there's something about that collision between basic poor theatre and unobtrusive technology that sums up the whole magic of Wee Stories; one of the least showy companies around, and yet one of the most quietly ambitious, when it comes – even on a damp night in Fort William – to leaving your audience shaken, stirred, and changed for good.
There's plenty of quiet ambition, too, in Paddy Cunneen's Fleeto, a 2007 Oran Mor lunchtime production now revived by V.Amp for a short tour. Designed to bring the intensity of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean verse to bear on the story of a modern Glasgow knife crime, this slightly expanded version has already generated public debate about whether it makes mythical heroes of young knife-carrying thugs, or goes right to the bloody heart of the tragedy that rips through the lives of victims and their families.
Whatever your verdict, though, this remains a hugely powerful show; and it features a superb trio of performances from Stewart Porter as a hard-bitten Glasgow policeman, Alison Peebles as the grieving mother of the victim, and a superb Jordan McCurrach as the young man with a knife in his hand, but only painful confusion in his heart.
• Macbeth is at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 11 October. One Giant Leap is at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye, tonight, the Badenoch Centre, Kingussie tomorrow, then touring until 11 October. Fleeto is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews tonight, the Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine tomorrow and then touring until 18 October.
The full article contains 993 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
