David Tennant as Macbeth - Donmar Warehouse / Harold Pinter

[drmaplewood]

I thought Tennant was great and worth the ticket but was left a bit cold / baffled with some of the production choices. The breaking of the 4th wall mentioned in posts above is dreadful and should be completely cut, IMO. It took me out of the action and for what did it actually add?

Unfortunately I was sat in C45 of the circle and my view of the glass box was heavily obscured by a speaker that was placed on front of it. It wasn't sold as restricted view so was a bit frustrating. Counted 8 empty seats too which surprised me.

3/5 for me, maybe I'll get more out the Fiennes one.

[eatbigsea]

Reviews are all raves. It was great, but I still preferred James McAvoy and Claire Foy 10 years ago [shrugs, is old]

[Mark]

Enjoyed it a lot, this was my first Macbeth and the first time I’ve revisited it since studying it at secondary school!
Tennant was great and as mentioned before the headphones add to the experience as such that when they whisper they can really whisper and you can clear everything crisp and clear.

[clarefh]

I saw this on Saturday.

Still trying to work out where I landed on the headphones - in some sections they worked really well, others less so. It took me about 30 minutes to really adapt to wearing them - as in watching the play through them - as well but by the end I’d pretty much forgotten I had them on.

The acting I thought was brilliant - I love Shakespeare and Shakespeare spoken so beautifully and clearly as it was by David Tennant is just pure pleasure to watch. Across the board the acting was very good. Also found the bringing to the fore of children, and the death of children on a personal level /importance of lineage was an interesting and clever take, and helped make sense of Lady Macbeth and humanise her ( and Cush Jumbo so skilful and moving in the role). Tenant’s Macbeth was brutal and cruel with Lady Macbeth acting more as the conscience.

This is where my reticence about the headphones comes in a little - the acting was so brilliant and the Donmar such a tiny space part of me would have loved to experience it ‘pure’ without the slight distance the headphones created.

Overall though a really fabulous production, that managed to feel fresh and compelling. If it wasn’t sold out I’d be going to see it again.

[parsley1]

So disappointing

Nothing new here

Some atrocious and terrible costuming

Poor Fleance looking like a school matron in a wool two piece

Staging way too minimal in a bad way

And the sound cliched and outdated

Shame to have to wear 1980s style economy class headphones too

I think having seen Stewart and Branagh give their all

I have seen my “Macbeth” in my lifetime

The Goold production was also directed so well

I don’t see it being ever matched

Since then from Kinnear to Eccleston

The play has been handled by cack handed directors

[dip]

Will do a post in the proper section when I’m home from the panto tonight but looking to sell two tickets for tomorrow night. A1 and A2, £48 each

[lynette]

Dec 20, 2023 21:34:06 GMT parsley1 said:

So disappointing

Nothing new here

Some atrocious and terrible costuming

Poor Fleance looking like a school matron in a wool two piece

Staging way too minimal in a bad way

And the sound cliched and outdated

Shame to have to wear 1980s style economy class headphones too

I think having seen Stewart and Branagh give their all

I have seen my “Macbeth” in my lifetime

The Goold production was also directed so well

I don’t see it being ever matched

Since then from Kinnear to Eccleston

The play has been handled by cack handed directors

You are right in that it has been a while since we have praised a brilliant prod of this play. Seems that studying it at GCSE level ruins it for budding directors. 😂

[Jan]

Dec 22, 2023 20:24:47 GMT lynette said:

Dec 20, 2023 21:34:06 GMT parsley1 said:

So disappointing

Nothing new here

Some atrocious and terrible costuming

Poor Fleance looking like a school matron in a wool two piece

Staging way too minimal in a bad way

And the sound cliched and outdated

Shame to have to wear 1980s style economy class headphones too

I think having seen Stewart and Branagh give their all

I have seen my “Macbeth” in my lifetime

The Goold production was also directed so well

I don’t see it being ever matched

Since then from Kinnear to Eccleston

The play has been handled by cack handed directors

You are right in that it has been a while since we have praised a brilliant prod of this play. Seems that studying it at GCSE level ruins it for budding directors. 😂

Yes it is odd, out of 15 productions of it I've seen only two were first class, Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood/Rupert Goold and Antony Sher/Harriet Walter/Greg Doran. But that is a higher strike rate than for King Lear. On the other hand I've hardly ever seen a production of Winter's Tale that wasn't very good, same for Troilus and Cressida and Pericles. 

[lynette]

Funny that, Jan. and just to add that the Othellos I’ve seen have all been remarkable and in the Hytner case, brilliant. What is it about the Scottish play that makes it a problem?

[Jan]

Dec 23, 2023 12:03:05 GMT lynette said:

Funny that, Jan. and just to add that the Othellos I’ve seen have all been remarkable and in the Hytner case, brilliant. What is it about the Scottish play that makes it a problem?

I think partly that it is incomplete, there are plainly scenes missing that make the plot disjointed and implausible - specifically there should surely be a scene where they actually decide and plan to kill Duncan. At the moment there’s a “What if …” discussion and then the next thing you know it’s somehow all decided. There are likely other missing scenes too (it is unusually short for a tragedy).

[vdcni]

I enjoyed it overall. It didn't match the Stewart/Fleetwood/Goold production but I preferred it to the McAvoy/Foy version though to be fair my visit to that was marred by some really terrible audience behaviour.

It started very slowly and I put a lot of that down to the headphones which did feel distancing without adding much.

As things progressed and the intensity ramped up and I got used to the headphones then things picked up and the two leads were excellent throughout though few really stood out from the rest of the cast.

The fourth wall breaking stuff was mildly amusing though the audience seemed a bit ambivalent. It seems a odd choice for this production as tonally it had nothing in common with anything else they were doing.

[parsley1]

Dec 23, 2023 15:19:34 GMT Jan said:

Dec 23, 2023 12:03:05 GMT lynette said:

Funny that, Jan. and just to add that the Othellos I’ve seen have all been remarkable and in the Hytner case, brilliant. What is it about the Scottish play that makes it a problem?

I think partly that it is incomplete, there are plainly scenes missing that make the plot disjointed and implausible - specifically there should surely be a scene where they actually decide and plan to kill Duncan. At the moment there’s a “What if …” discussion and then the next thing you know it’s somehow all decided. There are likely other missing scenes too (it is unusually short for a tragedy).

I agree fully

LM also vanishes for ages and suddenly becomes unhinged

The timescale for events is entirely unclear

I also think the staging is a factor in alleviating these issues

And lack of interval didn’t help

Here it was so sparsely executed

There was no sense or time or space or location

And no witches even seen

[Jan]

No witches seen ? That is unusual. I assume they have cut the Hecate scene. That scene in itself indicates the text is problematic because it includes material from a Thomas Middleton play that was written well after Macbeth was first performed - the suggestion is that the First Folio text (which came after them both) is actually Middleton’s rewrite of Shakespeare’s original.

It would not be a surprise as the First Folio is plainly far from definitive. Timon of Athens is hopelessly corrupt and apparently mistakenly contains two versions of the same scene.

[kathryn]

Dec 23, 2023 15:19:34 GMT Jan said:

Dec 23, 2023 12:03:05 GMT lynette said:

Funny that, Jan. and just to add that the Othellos I’ve seen have all been remarkable and in the Hytner case, brilliant. What is it about the Scottish play that makes it a problem?

I think partly that it is incomplete, there are plainly scenes missing that make the plot disjointed and implausible - specifically there should surely be a scene where they actually decide and plan to kill Duncan. At the moment there’s a “What if …” discussion and then the next thing you know it’s somehow all decided. There are likely other missing scenes too (it is unusually short for a tragedy).

Missing scenes might explain some of it. In addition I would say that it’s just too black and white, because it is written as propaganda to please James I. There’s not the sense that the characters could make different choices and that everything could end differently, because we are told it’s all preordained from the start, and there’s no room in the play for the witches not to actually be witches and the Macbeths to not actually be murderers.

[oxfordsimon]

Much as the Slinger version at the RSC was flawed, reimagining the Weird Sisters as the Weird Children who also were the Macduff children added a new supernatural twist. Looking back, perhaps they were also supposed to represent to children that the Macbeths lost in some way.

It was about the only interesting thing about the production.

But even that didn't get away from the point being made about everything being predetermined.

[Jan]

Everything being predetermined is the main feature of Greek tragedies and we’ve had some very good productions of those. It should not be a fatal flaw for a good director.

[kathryn]

Dec 25, 2023 9:31:23 GMT Jan said:

Everything being predetermined is the main feature of Greek tragedies and we’ve had some very good productions of those. It should not be a fatal flaw for a good director.

Ehhh, I don’t quite know how to explain the difference…

I guess in the Greek tragedies there’s just more of a sense of things being inevitable because of the fundamental nature of the characters, other choices were open to them in theory but they were doomed to make the choices they made, whereas with Macbeth it’s predetermined ‘just because’.

Maybe it’s just that I have different expectations for Shakespeare?
Macbeth just feels clunky; like a play that has been written to order to hit certain plot points. I know that the histories were also propaganda but they have a lot more nuance than Macbeth.

[Jan]

I’ve often thought that a ritualistic-type production might work, as it does for some Greek tragedies. At one point Katie Mitchell was planning a production which I thought could be good for that reason but it never happened. The famous Nunn/McKellen production which I didn’t see had elements of that. Having said that the Rupert Goold production which is the best I’ve seen was nothing like that - it drew a bit on modern horror films generating a high state of anxiety in the audience, as did his King Lear with a really queasy blinding of Gloucester scene.

[lynette]

Dec 25, 2023 1:10:12 GMT oxfordsimon said:

Much as the Slinger version at the RSC was flawed, reimagining the Weird Sisters as the Weird Children who also were the Macduff children added a new supernatural twist. Looking back, perhaps they were also supposed to represent to children that the Macbeths lost in some way.

It was about the only interesting thing about the production.

But even that didn't get away from the point being made about everything being predetermined.

Enjoying the discussion here. When I was taught M there was no info on the propaganda or the sucking up to James , it was all about motivation. When I taught it, I tried to introduce something on the political context and how the staging would have worked, that marvellous parade of descendants leading to James who would have been there for one of the performances in court. Sucking up doesn’t come close. But they got the King’s patronage which was what the actors wanted. Good Ole Shakey. Now having seen the productions referred to here, I can see that one of the problems is that we now are not scared of witches. Probably many of the contemporary audience weren’t by this time but just enough to give a frisson. The Slinger prod addressed this because we are still horrified by evil children. Finding something external that really frightens us is very difficult. And we need it to balance the internal mind games of M and Lady M. So now we get left with those mind games and it isn’t enough. Patrick Stewart’s prod, the totalitarian state was good cos we are scared of totalitarianism…just about. Waiting for the next lot to pick up this play and see what they can do. 

[Jan]

Dec 27, 2023 16:22:11 GMT lynette said:

Dec 25, 2023 1:10:12 GMT oxfordsimon said:

Much as the Slinger version at the RSC was flawed, reimagining the Weird Sisters as the Weird Children who also were the Macduff children added a new supernatural twist. Looking back, perhaps they were also supposed to represent to children that the Macbeths lost in some way.

It was about the only interesting thing about the production.

But even that didn't get away from the point being made about everything being predetermined.

Enjoying the discussion here. When I was taught M there was no info on the propaganda or the sucking up to James , it was all about motivation. When I taught it, I tried to introduce something on the political context and how the staging would have worked, that marvellous parade of descendants leading to James who would have been there for one of the performances in court. Sucking up doesn’t come close. But they got the King’s patronage which was what the actors wanted. Good Ole Shakey. Now having seen the productions referred to here, I can see that one of the problems is that we now are not scared of witches. Probably many of the contemporary audience weren’t by this time but just enough to give a frisson. The Slinger prod addressed this because we are still horrified by evil children. Finding something external that really frightens us is very difficult. And we need it to balance the internal mind games of M and Lady M. So now we get left with those mind games and it isn’t enough. Patrick Stewart’s prod, the totalitarian state was good cos we are scared of totalitarianism…just about. Waiting for the next lot to pick up this play and see what they can do. 

Maybe I should mention another famous production I didn't see (though some posters here did) - the Out of Joint one that set it in a contemporary African civil war context in which witchcraft was still a potent force. I think Monica Dolan was Lady M but all of the rest of the cast were black (except the Doctor who was some sort of UN aid worker ?). It was site specific - the audience herded around by gun-toting mercenaries, invited to pay to view the MacDuff corpses.  

[caa]

I saw the Out of Joint Macbeth at the old Arcola Theatre, in 2004. Danny Sapani played Macbeth. Monica Dolan's Lady M was based on an English woman called Emma McCune who married a warlord in Sudan. The production used different rooms in the venue before heading to the main stage, I recall that there was a real sense of place.

[zahidf]

Headphones a bit gimmicky but liked this a lot overall. Tennant is a great macbeth

[Courfeyrac]

Not a fan of the headphones. I found the set I had got really uncomfortable less than an hour in and had to half take them off to give my ear a break. Some scenes I could see them working, mostly the monologues, but for the most part I'd have greatly preferred a more traditional production.

I did like the cast, David Tennant and Cush Jumbo were excellent in the leads and the supporting cast was strong.

The 4th wall thing really threw me and I knew it was coming thanks to this thread. It seemed so tonally wrong. I don't know what it was supposed to add, apart from having one of the actors calling it a live action radio play.

Just some very odd choices that I feel detracted from the evening.

[alexandra]

Absolutely magnificent. The textual and emotional clarity are outstanding. Never cried before at Macduff’s reaction to the murder of his family (spoiler). Tennant abjured almost all of his natural jauntiness and was superb.The Out of Joint Sapani/Dolan (whatever happened to her) production has been my favourite for years, but this was on a par. I’ll be looking out for Max Webster-directed shows in future.

[Jan]

Jan 5, 2024 22:14:49 GMT alexandra said:

Never cried before at Macduff’s reaction to the murder of his family (spoiler). 

Did you see the Rupert Goold one ?