The Ashland Macbeth was a powerful production especially on the intimate Bowman stage. What lead Kevin Kenerly may lack in bulk he more than made up for in intensity and nuance. Erica Sullivan was a flaming Lady M, sadly broken when the steed she spurred into action ran off without her.
Two details speak to the micro attention this brilliant company gives its texts.
When Macbeth first takes his seat on the throne we note a telling touch. The top of the left side of the throne is broken off. The broken throne connotes a broken kingship, a broken order, a broken realm. And the king who has yet to realize he is as broken as the symbolic seat of his power.
It’s easy to miss this on the black-on-black set but it’s there — a reminder of the scrupulous attention this company pays to detail.
If the devil is in the details so are the angels. The other: the mad ranting Lady Macbeth is visited by her concerned doctor. In a glaring anachronism he’s a tall officious man in a 1950s grey overcoat carrying his house call black leather bag. So wrong is so right. He’s the outsider figure of sanity, measure, awareness, discretion, frozen on the fringe of the medieval castle gone mad.
There are at least two larger inflections in this production. The three weird sisters reappear whenever someone dies. That is, they physically embody the echoes of their predictions.
I was irritated when their appearance enabled the freshly killed King Duncan (David Kelly) to metamorphose into the Porter. It dulled the dramatic leap from the murder to the — however thematically relevant — comedy. However, their later appearances left the impression of an afterlife, the eternity into which the witches were guiding the newly departed. The evil men do lives after them….
As in the Coriolanus production, this Macbeth also turned the wars into dance. If one motive was to amplify the battle register of a very small cast, the primary effect was to amplify the emotional power and the sheer physical beauty of the movements, both individual and en masse. The showdown with Macduff returned to the heavy-sword norm.
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