Theatre in Review: Macbeth (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)

	Alan Cumming. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

The new Macbeth at the Ethel Barrymore is the kind of without-a-net high-wire act that only the most daring actor would risk -- daring or just plain out of his mind. Having seen Alan Cumming's high-concept solo take on Shakespeare's tragedy, I'm afraid we're dealing with a case of the latter.

I do not exaggerate, nor do I speak in metaphors. The lights come up on the sinister, green-tiled walls of Merle Hensel's towering insane asylum set, and there is Cumming, who clearly has been checked in for the duration. A doctor and an orderly undress him, putting his clothes into bags marked "evidence" and fitting him into a hospital gown. The doctor also tends three bloody slashes just above Cumming's sternum. Considering the circumstances, especially the prison-like atmosphere, he is remarkably calm. Then, just as the others are leaving, he calls to them, saying, "When shall we three meet again?"

And we're off, with Cumming assuming (almost) all the roles of The Scottish Play. For the first scene with the witches, he turns his back to the audience, his facial expressions caught by a camera and shown on three video screens above the stage. Impersonating Malcolm, son of Duncan, the king, he picks up a Victorian doll and for no good reason assumes a childish voice. When Macbeth speaks to the cutthroats hired to murder Banquo, Cumming speaks to a wall mirror -- underlining, as if we needed it, that we're spending an evening watching a man talk to himself. The murder of Macduff's child is staged by having Cumming take a child's sweater and savagely soak it in a bathtub.

Some minor acting support arrives late in the action. During the sleepwalking scene, the two medics appear in a window, located on the upstage wall, and they speak for the doctor and gentlewoman who are watching Lady Macbeth express her torment. ("This disease is beyond my practice," the doctor says, in one of the few moments all night that makes some kind of sense.) After that, the two of them are available to play messengers, soldiers, and other minor parts. And, after Banquo's ghost shows up -- in an eerie lighting cue by designer Natasha Chivers -- a man in a suit makes a brief appearance; if his head hadn't been covered in a leather mask reminiscent of the villains of the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie franchises, I might have thought he was a paying patron who had lost his way back from the men's room.

This Macbeth goes wrong in so many ways, it's difficult to describe them all, the most fundamental being the premise: It never becomes clear why this madhouse concept is anything more than a stunt; its connection to the action of Macbeth seems so distant as to be nonexistent. Furthermore, the script has been so severely streamlined that what we're seeing could be more fairly called Highlights from Macbeth. Cumming, who pours megatons of energy into the enterprise, does a poor job of differentiating between the characters. (Lady Macbeth gets a slightly feminine touch, and Duncan gets a kind of Colonel Blimp accent, but good luck picking out the others.) As the evening wears on, the staging ideas get nuttier and nuttier: For the scene in which Macbeth revisits the weird sisters, he opens an air duct, pulls out a dead bird, and proceeds to remove its entrails, one by one -- a very messy process, indeed. Soon after, the doctor enters, takes a poker-faced look at her bloody patient, and exits. Boy, I thought to myself, that's some asylum; Macbeth should have had better health insurance.

Even so, there are occasional moments of power. Lady Macbeth faints dead away in a moment of stress, signaling her psychological terrors to come; during the sleepwalking scene, Cumming scours his hands so ruthlessly that they bleed freely. The report of the slaughter of Macduff's family is handled so powerfully that for a second we feel like we're in a real tragedy and not a tricked-up house of horrors.

It's just possible that this production, first seen at the National Theatre of Scotland and earlier in New York at Lincoln Center's Rose Theatre, would work in a more intimate venue -- say one of the stages at the Public or perhaps St. Ann's Warehouse -- where Cumming could establish a taut psychological bond with the audience. But the Barrymore is far too big, and the vastness of Hensel's set further bars any kind of actor-audience connection. The best one can do is admire Cumming for his stamina, which, admittedly, is something to marvel at.

You can also admire Chivers' lighting, with its extensive and varied supply of sinister looks employing shadows, strange angles, and surprising splashes of coruscating color. The video design by Ian William Galloway makes suitable use of gritty black-and-white close-ups of Cumming's face. Fergus O'Hare's sound design, which blends a menacing hum with mournful music and wild bird calls, is really just one more arty touch in a production that already has too many of them.

I will add that there were plenty of cheers at the curtain call of the performance I attended, along with some walkouts. It's that kind of production. But I've seen Macbeth knocked around in too many conceptual stagings that, amid all the clutter, promise insights that never arrive. Really, people, the script is pretty good as is -- it's a lean thing, swift and sure and violent -- and it makes its horrifying points with chilling efficiency. This production is horrifying in all the wrong ways.--David Barbour