Vince Mathews and Liz Love have carved out a new play from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
In paring it down to some 75 minutes, this is a tragedy for the TikTok generation where attention spans are thrown onto the pyre of immediate entertainment or at least instant distraction. If you think I exaggerate, then consider that Simon Godwin’s production staring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma runs for 2 hours 30 mins, including an interval.
I am not against cutting of the classics on principle, and many texts have benefitted from a director’s judicious use of a scalpel. My own view is that any Macbeth is enhanced by cutting the Porter scene unless it can be interpreted as successfully as Dale Wylde achieved in Flabbergast Theatre’s Tragedy of Macbeth, where its loss would have been a tragedy of its own.
With V&L Productions’ Macbeth, I don’t mourn the cuts themselves, rather the extent of them. For the most part, the baby as gone with the bathwater. This has left a story from which director Liz Love has been able to create some moments of tension but left herself with little in the way of character development or much context with which to draw contemporary resonance, despite the not-so-distant-future setting chosen by her and Mathews for their adaptation.
In their post-apocalypse world, where the normal order of things has gone to pot, it makes sense that the course of Shakespeare’s events can take place without the need for the characters’ moral considerations or battles with their conscience. The sense is that in this ethical void, anyone can be king and the fates are putting the idea into Macbeth’s head that there is a future where it could be him.
Without the characters’ deliberations, however, we don’t get to know or feel sufficiently for Macbeth to consider his downfall a tragedy in its traditional sense. He made a try for the top crown and lost—who’s up next?
It is a joy these days to see a cast of eight, even with doubling up, and more, of roles. The Witches, in medical gowns, promise much in their opening scene, but the baton is quickly dropped, the skeletal text lost in a race to the next scene, leaving only David Martinez as Macduff as consistently able to deliver the lines with understanding and nuance.
Were all, or at least most, of the cast up to Martinez’s continuity and competence, some purpose might be found here, but with costume and lighting designs that fail to pull their weight adding to the production’s opacity, this fast-paced re-imagining of Macbeth is left signifying nothing.