The Scottish play

My foray into British theater commenced this evening in excellent style. The production of Macbeth, which was developed at the Chichester Festival Theatre, recently arrived in London at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End, and has been well advertised with posters in the Underground featuring the play's star, Partrick Stewart. Like many people, I know Mr. Stewart best as Star Trek's beloved Captain Picard, so I was delighted to find his stage presence to be equal to his screen presence. The cast was strong all around, but his performance was stellar. Macbeth's motives are complicated—murky even—but Mr. Stewart conveyed the conflicted character convincingly, and hit just the right notes as his character descends into madness.

Other aspects of the production are equally worthy of mention. The setting of the play was transformed into the Soviet Union of the late 1940s. Using the costly victory in World War II and Stalin's cruel reign as a softly-referenced historical background made the play significantly more accessible, and allowed clever use of film footage taken from that era. The set itself was brutally utilitarian, with dingy tile walls, a boxy fiberglass sink upstage, and a old TV and an accordion-gated elevator downstage. This room easily became the hospital in the opening scene, the "hall" of Act II (re-imagined as a kitchen), and at times, with the use of digital projectors, a forest and the frightening otherworld of the Weird Sisters. Perhaps most impressive of all was the perfect use of the intermission, wedged into the middle of a slightly modified act III, scene iv, which burns the image of Banquo's apparition into the minds of the audience and delays the resolution of the moment.

If the other plays on my list for the semester are half so good, I'll be in for a very good time.