Ralph Fiennes kills it in ‘Macbeth’

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Shakespeare Theatre Company envisions a contemporary feel for the Scottish play, evoking current wars with gripping emotions and, from actor Ralph Fiennes, a touch of wit.

In a deracinated, begrimed landscape, a cluster of trees marks the only sign of life. Among the rubble are a dusty tire, a car frame, wire netting, some tanks and other mangled implements, all of which testify to the presence of people who have recently fled a makeshift encampment. We think of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war in Gaza. Violence in Tigray.

Unlike Coriolanus, the Scottish thane is not a nihilistic “thing of blood” who wants to be “a kind of nothing.” Conversing with one of the murderers , he confesses to being “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / to saucy doubts and fears.” After a regicidal rampage, he finally cuts his engine when he realizes that he has been misled by the witches’ prophecies. After boughs from Birnam Wood descend on Dunsinane, Macbeth is felled as much by an error in interpretation as by his rival’s sword.

She also deserves partial design credit for her advice “to beguile the time, Look like the time”; this production looks devastatingly of our time. The stage is largely devoid of furnishings. All we see is the befogged facade of a concrete-colored residence. A pair of frosted glass sliding doors occasionally opens and closes like a nictitating membrane. The blood that trickles down the top walls in one scene is easy to miss from certain seats.

As it happens, another “Macbeth”-derived psychodrama is concurrently running at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Compared to the elisions in Godwin’s production, those in Zinnie Harris’s “In this version, Lady M and Lady Macduff are close cousins, the latter is pregnant with Banquo’s child, the three witches are impecunious neighbors rather than supernal beings, Lady M has had five failed births, and it is Macbeth rather than his wife who sleepwalks.

 

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