Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Macbeth
This radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish play is set in a psychiatric unit, focusing on a solitary patient who is channeling the story of Macbeth.
4.0 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Location |
Glasgow |
| Venue |
Tramway |
| Director |
John Tiffany & Andrew Goldberg |
| Cast |
Alan Cumming |
| From |
June 2012 |
| Until |
June 2012 |
| Box Office |
0845 330 3501 |
| |
This radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish play is set in a psychiatric unit, focusing on a solitary patient who is channeling the story of Macbeth.
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Mark Brown
“It is one thing to tie play to concept, it is quite another for an actor to make it work. That Cumming does so, and so abundantly, is a tremendous testament to his remarkable abilities. As he shifts between the major (and some minor) characters of the play, Cumming is as compelling in crazed dialogue as in soliloquy. At one moment he is spinning round in a wheeled hospital chair, in the role of a comically beneficent Duncan. At another he is on a bed, powerfully evoking Lady Macbeth’s crucial seduction of her wavering spouse. It is a performance of extraordinary vocal dexterity and physical energy.”
17/06/2012
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The Guardian
Mark Fisher
“A vision of one man's helpless descent into madness and suicidal despair. No production since Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia has so distressingly captured the inescapable hold of mental illness. Cumming has a masterful command of the language, making it clear and comfortable on the ear as he subtly shifts register from character to character. Whatever the part, you rarely see casting this good. Tiffany and Goldberg orchestrate his performance with a fabulous sense of space and pace, breaking up the potential relentlessness of a one-man show with a dynamic use of movement and stillness.”
17/06/2012
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The Independent
Anna Burnside
“Even for those who do not enjoy high-concept Shakespeare performed by a coquettish hairy-legged man in a towel, there is much to enjoy. It is 100 minutes of poetry, with Cumming spitting fire as a witch, squeezing every drop of filth and fury from Lady Macbeth’s great speeches before becoming a pitiful, hand-wringing shadow. What the staging sacrifices in scale and context it gains in humanity. Some Macbeths lose their human tragedy to make a political point. This production does the opposite and shows individual disintegration through a series of disastrous choices. It was disturbing and moving and thoroughly deserved its whooping standing ovation.”
18/06/2012
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The Observer
Clare Brennan
“Directors Andrew Goldberg and John Tiffany offer no programme explanations. Their production comes across as a meditation on Macbeth's view of life as "a tale told by an idiot ... signifying", here, something less than Shakespeare but much more than "nothing". If you can accept its terms, it becomes an intriguing expression of the unknowable mystery of an individual experience of existence. If you cannot – you leave.”
17/06/2012
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The Stage
Thom Dibdin
“It is something of a tour de force from Cumming. There are slightly bumpy moments in the back-and-forth of dialogue, where lesser characters are hard to distinguish from each other, but where it matters there is no such lack of demarcation ... His base character is a vulnerable, tortured soul, caught up in a cyclical world, a madhouse in which he is the only inmate, treated with pity and compassion by his minders. The rest might be Shakespeare’s characters, but they come warped and recreated by this tortured mind. So it is that the paunchy, bloated Duncan pontificating from a wheeled chair is hardly the good king.”
18/06/2012
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The Times
Robert Dawson Scott
“For all that it plays on a more personal scale than full-blooded Shakespearean tragedy, I’m not sure that the whole sheds quite as many fresh insights into the play as the ambition of the project promised.”
17/06/2012
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