Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Max Webster
The Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth may have snagged some big names in David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, but its unique approach to sound is what sets it apart.
On arrival, the audience are asked to put on some headphones which test the right and left ears separately. These binaural headphones take the live spoken (and musical) performances happening in the theatre and mix them together with other layered sounds, spoken clips and effects. While most of the action happens on stage, some happens in total blackness and some behind a wall of sound-proof windows. It’s a choice which changes the whole dynamic of the piece.
Tennant is an actor who is not afraid of going big. He has a wildly expressive face and suffers no self-consciousness if a performance asks for loud. In the small space of the Donmar, he can play small and with his microphone picking up every puff of breath, he can murmur lines with the expectation of them being heard by the whole audience. Macbeth is a play filled with plotting, and having the lead mumble his soliloquies to himself really brings out that psychological, interior quality. When Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth tells her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place, she does it in his ear, as a tickling whisper which is barely voiced.
The earphones also create extra texture during the louder moments of the play. The voices of the wayward sisters (using their first folio designation) come from all directions in the three-dimensional sound mix, their voices overlapping and mixing with the cawing of crows. The castle siege at the end is punctuated with cannon fire and shouting. There’s a band who play during party scenes and feasts, but also during transitions with songs in Gaelic, incorporating sounds inspired by birds. The sound-mix also provides the audience with the sounds of Macbeth’s haunted dagger, and at the remonstrations of Banquo as he shakes his gory locks – even as the stage is blank, inviting the audience to see them as figments in Macbeth’s shattered mind.
The stage is often blank. As rich an aural experience as Macbeth is, it’s often visually spartan. The stage is a raised, white space, with a row of sound-proofed windows behind, showing a long, white corridor. A few scenes take place in this corridor; it serves as Macduff’s castle, for example, but it’s mostly where the performers who are not on stage sit as a chorus and watch the action. The costumes are largely black and grey, with both men and women wearing rather long, formal kilts. The exception is Lady Macbeth, dressed in white, even as she prompts Macbeth to black acts.
A theme of the play, raised in the programme, is PTSD and Macbeth is introduced washing the blood of battle from his hands. Tennant treats this as a simple, quotidian act, just part of being a good Thane and fighting his king’s enemies. Contrasting this with the horror when he has the king’s blood on his hands and Macbeth is a completely different person, requiring his wife to finish the job of framing the guards. By the end, Tennant is wan and waxy, devoid of feeling, willing to snap necks. It’s a compelling performance of a man who has “too much of the milk of human kindness” and has found himself committing heinous deeds.
Lady Macbeth always has the harder role. Her eagerness to jump straight into murder to aid her husband’s ambitions seems a little sudden. Jumbo plays her as someone who is already injured, remembering the son she has lost and seeing him in the sons of the other characters, all played by the same boy. Hers is not an evil portrayal, but a woman who starts the play with the emotional damage Macbeth has at the end, and only goes down from there.
The rest of the cast is very good. Benny Young’s King Duncan is all kindness and nobility, Cal Macaninch’s Banquo has good chemistry with Tennant, even as he is quietly excited about his own prophecy. Jatinder Singh Randhawa plays the porter. He keeps the core theme of guarding the gateway to hell but uses that to break the fourth wall, ask the audience why they are wearing headphones and banter with the audience. It’s still a jarring change of tone after Duncan’s murder, but it feels intentional.
Ultimately though, this production is defined by its use of headphones. They allow the actors to give interestingly quiet, intimate portrayals without any bombast or bluster. They allow the production to create sound and fury out of nothing. But the headphones also have a distancing quality, taking away that thrill of performers and audience sharing the same space. Instead of the actor’s voices resonating through the air and entering the audience’s ears, they are mediated by the earphones. And instead of the audience having a group experience, each member has their own private one. That said, it’s worth experiencing to see performances that would be impossible on stage otherwise.
Runs until 10 February 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Come for the sound and the fury.
