The Lounge, Chatswood Concourse, August 5
6/10
Macbeth must gnaw at your vitals with ever-increasing ferocity, just as the titular character’s desperation to escape his predicament gnaws at his own. It should be impossible to sit there passively: you should feel the spell ensnaring you; feel the blackness swelling.
This production touches that abyss: intermittently at first; in a rush in the Act III banquet scene, when Macbeth (Charles Mayer) sees Banquo’s ghost. Then we feel Macbeth’s inner terror, as Mayer’s characterisation – sometimes too detached – suddenly congeals. Now we understand that, while Macbeth may have been an efficient killing machine as a soldier, murder lay beyond his bounds, until one kept demanding another and another.
The banquet works all the more effectively because we audience members are made to be the other guests. This stripped-down production has a cast of only six, where Shakespeare’s original 30-odd characters might conventionally be played by a dozen or more actors. Because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Jo Bloom) address us as their guests, we’re drawn into the scene, and consequently deeper into the terrors beating in his heart.
The production is presented by Chatswood Concourse’s new resident theatre company, Come you Spirits, and is collectively directed, reflecting the company’s ethos. Not only is the cast pared back, the show has a running time of only 90 minutes (plus interval). So even if it took until the banquet scene to fully pull us in, it hadn’t taken long to get there.
Having proved that he could grip us by the throat, Mayer could not quite sustain that intensity, however. Macbeth’s final soliloquy, which comes when he’s been told his wife is dead, and which, containing “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his how upon the stage…” is one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches, slid by without impaling us. It was too rushed, but, more than that, for us to be appalled, Macbeth’s very bowels must be appalled, and that we didn’t feel.
Bloom was convincing as both the lover and the spur of her husband, and slipped deeper into Lady Macbeth as the play progressed. As with her colleagues, she was fighting a creeping sense of melodrama exacerbated by Brandon Read’s busy score. The music certainly helped set the eerie mood and tone, but could have been expunged more often beneath the voices.
Letitia Hodgkinson’s effective set and costumes gave us the extremely rare pleasure of having the play restored to its period setting. An oddity was having such a long runway extending from the stage into the audience, as this left most of the action more remote from us than if the stage itself came further forward.
Among a cast completed by David Halgren, Ciaran O’Riordan and dancer Ella Havelka, Willa King stood out as the First Witch, possessing such a commanding voice as could have made me, too, believe that I was fated to be the Scottish King.
Until August 9.
https://www.darlingharbour.com/whats-on/events/macbeth-come-you-spirits