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Tim Albery's Macbeth is under attack. Michael Billington rides to the rescue
A month ago Tim Albery's Nabucco provoked boos and counter-cheers at Covent Garden. But there was no such passion at Stratford-on-Avon, where his new Macbeth was received with polite applause. I, however, found it a compellingly intelligent production: one that shows the influence both of German theatre and the ENO of the eighties in its stylised lighting, emblematic grouping and inventive use of space.
Stewart Laing's design and Mimi Jordan Sherin's lighting set the tone: we see a gradual stripping away of layers of illusion as if we are slowly being led towards the barren consequences of tyranny. At first, it is set on a raked forestage before black ramparts and a rook-adorned skycloth. This yields to the Macbeths' castle: a stark inhospitable place with beige prefab walls and strip lighting. Eventually this opens up to reveal a painted backcloth depicting the ravaged countryside that is the product of Macbeth's bleak absolutism.
Better this than the old-fashioned Macbeth which Agate summarised as a mix of "tartan manners, berserk headgear and uncouth whiskerage". But the visual emphasis on the sterility of power is accompanied by an equally strong stress on the psychological consequences of childlessness. Roger Allam's finely spoken Macbeth is clearly haunted, in this respect, by the contrast between himself and Banquo. He murderously fondles Fleance, is wickedly mocked in the apparition scene by a succession of child Banquos, all - a brilliant touch - adorned with their father's moustache, and even turns up for the slaughter of Macduff's son as if to destroy what he cannot have.
It is not a new idea: Cleanth Brooks wrote a famous essay listing babe-references in Macbeth and it dominated Adrian Noble's 1986 production. But it unifies this broken-backed play and motivates Allam's descent into black tyranny. He starts as a nervous hypocrite, much aided by Sherin's snap lighting: he warmly seizes the Prince of Cumberland by the hand, for instance, only to turn to us in a pinpoint light to announce "that is a step on which I must fall down". Before the murder of Duncan, he giggles with apprehension: only after it is he plagued by the supreme pointlessness of king-killing without an heir.
It is a strong, coherent reading. But, if childlessness is the key metaphor, one needs a greater sense of painful marital intimacy with Brid Brennan's Lady M. Brennan, rolling up her sleeves as she nips off with the bloodstained daggers, is clearly the tough pragmatist to Allam's guilty dreamer; but one never gets a sense of the past history of a fraught marriage as one did when Jonathan Pryce and Sinead Cusack played the pair.
Albery's visual style and analytic brain, however, bind the show together. He doesn't get everything right: the England scene drags and, though one can see his point that with the elevation of Malcolm one emotional wreck succeeds another, it makes the end anti-climactic. But he has a great success with the Porter, whom Adrian Schiller plays superbly as a soused doorman, who finally plunges drunkenly into an on-stage pit; but then Albery, who directed Wallenstein, always was good with people called Schiller. Philip Quast's Banquo, Colum Convey's Macduff and Jan Chappell's Lady Macduff lend weight to a production that skilfully anatomises the emotional emptiness of tyranny: one that also confirms that the RSC is gradually moving away from the collective humanism of the Nunn years towards a more controversial neo-Expressionist aesthetic.
