McPanto

Otherwise known as the Young Vic version of Macbeth. The Young Vic likes to be different, sometimes mistaking change for flair, so while the Globe made a gore fest of Macbeth, the Young Vic added a lot of rather pretentious music & movement interludes. At least I made it all the way through, unlike the Globe effort a few years back, which saw my second life-time, half-time exit from a theatrical production. See reference 1.

The train from Epsom included a young female cruncher-muncher sitting opposite me and a young male with a full head tattoo a bit further away - so full head that I wondered how you could safely do a needle job behind the ears, where the skull comes very close to the surface. Not for me, thank you very much.

The theatre and its associated facilities were very full of bright, mostly young things when I arrived so I repaired to the nearby and new-to-me pub called the Ring, just by Borough tube station. Busy and rather good, perhaps helped along by undergraduates from the nearby outpost of Lewisham University, aka LESOCO. Lots of boxing pictures - there was, I think, a real connection - and they were even able to manage a very decent Piquepoul blanc, something I had not come across before.

On the way back from the pub I came across Calder Books, a shop I had not visited or thought of for a very long time. But in their window they had the same volume three of the handsome yellow, soft back edition of the selected works of Mao Tse-tung (as he was spelt in my younger days) as I had owned in my younger days. All very nostalgic, despite the reputation Mao has since - deservedly - acquired.

The full Young Vic, for a change, was arranged as a proscenium arch theatre, with a cunning set which made one think underground bunker - which was, I think, the idea, and starting out as a field dressing station. This modern dress production also contained a rather ridiculous, spivvy Duncan. Middle aged and crass, not a hint of the angelic about him. See Act I, Scene VII, Line 19.

The witches took the form of three young women, stripped to their small-clothes and probably ballet trained. They provided, or at the least provided the balletic core of, a number of more or less irrelevant ballet numbers through the course of the show.

The cast had been instructed to speak their important lines slow so that we could understand them, with the down side noticed at Henry IV that a lot of their poetic force was lost. Others were gabbled. Plus, a lot of the lines had been cut, to get the whole thing, including ballet, down to two hours without an interval. So we lost, for example, most of the porter scene and the speech in the murderers scene which starts 'Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men'.

The 'But I must also feel it as a man' scene fell a bit flat and I dare say most of it was cut. But Macduff's abandonment of his wife and children did come across. While Macbeth's despair when he lost his wife did not. He had lost the will to live and chose not to stand the siege - which he could well have - choosing to die with harness on his back. The importance of this last to an early modern audience being lost, as was Siward's concern that his son's death wound should be front rather than back.

Rather than refer back to the bloody deeds of Mao, the production referred to the present, to the mistreatment of the prisoners on both sides in Iraq and elsewhere. Lots of hoods and beheadings. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to refer back to the equally bloody time of religious strife in Scotland, not many decades after the play was written, in the late seventeenth century, and which, as it happens, I have just read about in a stray copy of the TLS. Ask google about the killing times in Scotland to read all about it.

Despite all this, both Macbeth (John Heffernan) and his wife (Anna Maxwell Martin) appeared to have real talent, badly directed. They both had, inter alia, admirably mobile faces. A real sense of raw ambition and throne-greed getting the better of them. Notwithstanding, Macbeth did not project the power of a fighting man - which Banquo did manage. More the ambivalence of a Hamlet.

And thinking of throne-greed, I associate now to the one-time director of LSE, also one-time principal of the College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, who reported that his students, in what is now Zimbabwe, knew all about throne-greed. Macbeth was a play that they related to. A remark which would count as racist now?

PS: the occasion was graced by the presence of her Grace the Dame of Barnaby, lately the wife of John Nettles in Midsomer Murders. Very tall, middle of the second row, complete with courtiers. At least I think it was her. And there were a few other luvvy-looking types in the otherwise very young audience.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=globbeth.

Reference 2: http://theringbarlondon.co.uk/.