A Macbeth neither fair nor foul

Macbeth

Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Des McAnuff
Starring Colm Feore and Yanna McIntosh
At the Stratford Festival

Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of paradoxes - days that are foul and fair, battles lost and won - but Des McAnuff's production of the play is a paradox in itself. With Colm Feore in the title role, it is a subdued spectacle, a show both bloody and strangely bloodless.

This is the second season in a row that the Stratford Shakespeare Festival has opened with deafening, swan-scattering machine-gun fire.

But McAnuff has upped the ante from his Romeo and Juliet of last year, throwing a few grenades into the mix and, for good measure, crashing a jeep onstage. Sound and fury abound, but what does it all signify?

Here is a Macbeth who first appears to us as an aristocratic action hero. As bullets whiz by him, Feore struts across the stage without a fret, picking off opponents with a rifle as nonchalantly as if he's out skeet shooting on a sunny afternoon. He is a war hero at this moment, not yet a war criminal - but you can already tell that he's most in his element in the killing fields.

Though McAnuff's production is transposed to "mythic mid-20th-century Africa," amid messy postcolonial power struggles, Feore's eloquent, emaciated and emotionless Macbeth brings to mind none other than Barack Obama. And that's before Yanna McIntosh's Lady Macbeth arrives on stage, with the hairdo, composure and sculpted biceps of Michelle Obama. Alas, Feore and McIntosh lack the chemistry of America's first couple.

McIntosh's Lady Macbeth is as understated as her husband at the start, a curious choice for literature's most notorious femme fatale. At their initial reunion, Macbeth greets her not as if he's returning from battle, but as if he had just popped out to the corner to fetch some milk. Their kiss is perfunctory, passionless. I found it difficult to believe that McIntosh's Lady Macbeth could compel her husband to take out the trash, never mind the King of Scotland. She doesn't seem hungry for anything, let alone power.

Without the Macbeths' central relationship firmly established, the human anchor to the story is lost and the ensuing tragedy has little emotional impact.

There are some fine supporting performances elsewhere in this Scottish/African power struggle. As King Duncan, Geraint Wyn Davies - who was a formidable Polonius in Hamlet last year - once again creates a gull you are sorry to see culled. As Malcolm, Duncan's son, Gareth Potter has power, charisma and a firm grasp of the text that eludes some of the other younger company members.

Sanjay Talwar's Lennox makes an impression, which I thought was noteworthy, because Lennox never makes an impression.

McAnuff's change in locale involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, especially in regards to the climate. All that rain and fog doesn't exactly scream Uganda (even if dictator Idi Amin did once proclaim himself King of Scotland).

The shift in setting does pay some dramatic dividends, however. The witches are a trio of village women (Karen Glave, Amanda Lisman and Cara Ricketts), scavenging for food, the unsung victims of the violence unspooling across the land. Chillingly, when Macduff's family is slaughtered, it is done with machetes, summoning thoughts of other conflicts initiated by power mongers so paranoid that they deemed children and even babies a threat.

McAnuff eventually retreats from his African parallels, however. Soon we are in a generic bunker with static-filled television screens that subtract from rather than add to the horror. By the end, he has thoroughly confused things by bringing out two flags, one with Scotland's Saint Andrew's cross and the other, a giant Union Jack.

Wherever we are, at least it looks good. The Banquo-less banquet, where Macbeth sees the ghost of the friend he had murdered, is supremely well staged. There are subtler touches that stay with you, as well. Lady Macbeth leads a trembling Macbeth by the hands after the murder of Duncan, an image soon mirrored when Macbeth pulls his wife along by the hand after he raises the stakes by killing Banquo.

Later, when Lady Macbeth, in a sleepwalking horror, chants "Come, come, come, come, give me your hand," she puts her arms out to be led by her husband once more - but he is no longer there.

Speaking of unanswered knocks, we mustn't omit a mention of the porter. Tom Rooney wrings reliable laughs out of the line about drink both provoking and unprovoking lechery, but he absolutely aces his earlier speech, where he imagines himself as the doorkeeper to hell. McAnuff has updated the passage, so he greets a legislator, a priest and, most timely of all, "a broker who hanged himself on th' expectation of plenty." (It's a farmer in the original.)

"I pray you, remember the porter," Rooney implores. I doubt anyone could forget him. He briefly opens the door to humanity in a cold, antiseptic production where the Macbeths' hands get soaked in blood, but neither gets a drop on their clothing.

Macbeth continues at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ont., until Oct. 31.