MACBETH
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Sam Gold
Starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga
Longacre Theatre
Official Site
Reviewed by David Spencer
Director Sam Gold’s staging of Macbeth is probably best reviewed in brief. There’s nothing wrong with the notion of doing a stripped-down, rehearsal clothes production of a Shakespeare play—in popular commercial theatre, that notion goes back at least to the John Gielgud production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton in 1964 (which was filmed and that you can see on YouTube)—but the notion also needs a unifying concept, or at least a sense that the whole thing somehow hangs together on a clear vision, and this Macbeth simply doesn’t.
It’s as if Gold went into rehearsals and said, “We’re just going to try [stuff] and [fool] around with text and props and we’ll use whatever amuses us.” (There’s a mostly true maxim that no sound is more misleading than rehearsal laughter. Which may or may not have relevance to what actually occurred, but absolutely characterizes the end result.)
The production amounts to a seemingly random grab bag of business and multiple casting devices that don’t work and it makes Shakespeare’s reputedly shortest tragedy seem very long indeed. The good news, such as it is, is that Daniel Craig in the title role and Ruth Negga as his lady are as in control of what they do as possible, and give focused, realistic performances within the cloud of muddle.