by It was an open theater week. Wreathed in the supernatural. Powered by cutting-edge technology. Max Webster’s gimlet was produced Macbeth – the third major study of the play this year – combines the brilliant acting of David Tennant and Cush Jumbo with the pioneering binaural sound of Gareth Fry. You listen to the play through headphones. Something that creates that distracts you only skillfully. They don’t shut you out but let you in. They represent a proscenium arch that directs attention.
In your ears, inside your head, are Macbeth’s urgent thoughts, the shrill whisper of the strange – here “the way” – his sisters, the crow and the crow of crows, the smear of a broken neck, the innocent cry of Alasdair MacRae’s Scotsman. country.
You hear but not see everything – those Waywards are a form of smoke – which perfectly captures the way the play floats in and out of the illusion, engaging the senses. Rosanna Vize’s design is entirely monochrome, with musicians – fiddle, accordion, Irish singer – in harmony with witnesses behind glass. Costumes tell the stories of the characters: sober felts, semi-structured jackets, military without straight uniforms; Macbeth in a lean gray T-shirt, honed down; Duncan (an unusually memorable appearance by Benny Young) is a robed sailor; Lady Macbeth nicely misguided in white.
Everything proves nothing from the central performances, with Porter rumbling Jatinder Singh Randhawa, doubling as Seytan (with a good play on the punctuation), adding a note from the depths. Tennant’s grace makes it easy to see the contours of the action: he never hesitates. But there is nothing broad about his performance. His meeting decision is made up of tiny, effortless moments. The pause is fine when he says that the king will leave his castle the next day – “as he wishes”; no more than a hover of hesitation to summon a cloud, without revealing its secret. As he gains purpose his eyes seem to change shape, to change shopping.
The trip on a ship so big that the Cutty Sark has broken into the stalls is worth the price of the ticket alone.
Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth has radiant energy: she goes for the big job because she can’t help but drive forward. But doubts always cast a shadow over her: when she declares that “sleep and the dead are only pictures”, she is not mocking her husband’s fears but confronting them herself. Both add to the wonder of the verse at the moment, not by summing it up but by looking back: focusing on what it really is. Or is it?
feast of Stranger Things: The First Shadow most of the innovative technological productions are like finger food. The writing is great but from the dash, the drive, the grip of the stage.
It was Stephen’s idea (The Crown) Daldry: co-directs with Justin Martin. The script is credited to Kate Trefry, who draws on an original story by the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne, traces the backstory of a new monster and sketches the life of character Winona Ryder (a very convincing Isabella Pappas) and her friends as teenagers in the 1950s. . You can follow the thread without doing any homework, but get something if you can get the frisson of recognition that runs through the fans when those lines of blood (more sinister because there’s no hot gush) run down your face
Clump takes the spell out of real-life traumas: an older generation is haunted by dreams of war. Clump goes with a shoppy plea for love as a saving grace. The awkwardness doesn’t matter much. The story is true elsewhere. In the melting of dimensions, moving from one mode to another: video to flesh, substance to puffs of smoke, schoolboys to another monstrous self. As the world turns upside down, as justice becomes dirty, technology is not just a resource or an add-on, it is part of the matter, our other.
The first hours – related to the escape of a ship as large as the Cutty Sark break into the stalls – they are worth the price of the ticket. As with some quick horrors: a glance from the psychokinetically gifted person sends the rat into a pink splat and empty jars settle as hot as spiders. Lights flash around the auditorium and the sound of broken glass cracks behind the audience; on stage, clouds of smoke float into multi-tentcular morphing shapes.
Jon Clark (lighting), Paul Arditti (sound), 59 Productions (video and visual effects) and Miriam Buether, whose sets – a shadow-leaked attic, a white-tiled laboratory, a perfect line of school lockers – are a delight. See Utterly solid but swing around in seconds to change scene. There is also a human center. Daldry took young acting to a new level i Billy Elliot, and he ups the game here as well. As the hero villain, Louis McCartney makes a great stage debut, clenched and flailing, completely natural and completely different. There may come a day (though it’s hard to imagine now) when these whirlwind effects are no longer surprising, but McCartney’s acting will continue to make characters look new.
Character i Ulster American He no doubt speaks for many when he says that the only thing he wants a theater critic to read is a suicide note. Anyway: on with us. One of the joys of David Ireland’s plays is that their machine-gun provocations are so pervasive that almost everyone ends up caught in their crossfire. This is not as original a play as Peerless Cyprus Avenue (2016), where a man thought Gerry Adams was an incarnation of his infant granddaughter, but he is alive with the playwright’s unique combination of physical savagery and intellectual eloquence.
Jeremy Herrin’s fast-paced, bright production features strong performances from an all-star cast. Woody Harrelson is funny when a lonely Hollywood actor tackles a young woman’s play about Northern Ireland (“What is Ulster?”), slipping into a horse pose and a handstand. Andy Serkis, pushing down glasses of red wine the size of a child’s face, has a precarious right-mindedness as a nervous director. Louisa Harland (from TVs Girls of Derry, which also starred David Ireland) plays the playwright with insatiable wit: she’s the smartest character – and she’s given opinions that won’t go down easily with all the liberal audiences. Ireland’s determined indignation – on the subject of misogyny that has a rapture close to the wind – can relate to its more incisive arguments. But now and again it makes me laugh uncontrollably: “What if,” asks one man, “Jesus put a gun to your head…?”
Star ratings (out of five)
Macbeth ★★★★
Stranger things ★★★★
Ulster American ★★★
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Macbeth is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, until 10 February
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Stranger things at the Phoenix Theatre, London WC2, until 30 June
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Ulster American at Riverside Studios, London W6, until 27 January
