Macbeth Bewitched

...But a junior member who follows instructions...

...Michael Kahn has sought new approaches to the character and landscape...

...which are more imaginative and decisive than any he did during his seasons as resident designer at Lincoln Center...

...They will infect his reign, too...

...Now, the run-of-the-mill Macbeth is cursed with an embarrassment of witches...

...The slides are part of the production's most conspicuous novelty, Douglas W. Schmidt's settings...

...Every piece of scenery is encased in this armor, most obtrusively an immense sliding partition, a variant of the baroque shutter, separating the forestage (the court scenes) from the rearstage (the heath...

...For Macbeth he has cast Fritz Weaver, an astonishingly resourceful actor whose Hamlet of 15 years ago I remember as an almost ideal matching of icy wit and physical impetuosity...

...In the text a meeting between Hecate and the witches (omitted by Kahn to his own detriment, since it supports his interpretation) tells us that Macbeth has proved unsatisfactory, "a wayward son,/Spiteful and wrathful...

...Murphy's Lady Macbeth, fondling her crucifix and then vehemently spitting on it...

...Throughout the play Weaver does not put a foot or a finger or a word wrong...

...The courtiers, men and women alike, wear costumes of black flecked with white...

...Something like this universal disarray attends Macbeth's reign and haunts Shakespeare's text...

...His reconciliation with the six conspirators is the best scene...

...When he finally speaks that line he means not merely that mortality intervenes but that he and his wife have been cruelly used, and used up...

...it vanishes after Duncan's murder-the triumph of Macbeth and his witch-sponsors...

...They also do it with playwrights, designers and actors...

...Once Macbeth has activated the plan the witches will abandon him...

...In the sets and clothes, then, we see three periods represented, but they share one characteristic...

...as Brutus, a good guy gone awry...

...Her husband happens to be the chosen factotum, and her task is to win him over, to still his ethical qualms with "the valor of [her] tongue...

...He cries out to the sleepers in the castle to "ring the alarum bell...

...Kahn's Macbeth pushes his valuable career forward and carries the american theater forward with it...

...His line readings are subtle and his presence aristocratic...

...in practice it too often hammered plays into standardized shapes, denying them their enigmas...

...For the rectitude and indecision of Brutus, Philip Kerr offers monotony and stiffness...

...These two are a decent pair who, even in their brutal moments, do not strike us as being brutes, though we never quite click with them, either...

...Steel battlements, staircases and thrones glide into view...

...The speech is more than mad fancy...

...Shakespeare and his contemporaries may or may not have feared witches, but they did respond alertly to the surviving tragedies of Seneca, where evil deeds by men evoke disorder on a cosmic scale...

...Thereafter antony dwindles in importance...

...Was it arthurian and chivalric because of the sword-fights...

...One or two critics, including Julius Novick in the Sunday New York Times, grumbled about the discrepancy between the period costumes and the ultra-Bauhaus stage design...

...bleakness...

...The heavens crack, stars collide, darkness falls suddenly, mighty storms batter the earth and overload its rivers, chasms open, and the sun quakes-which is more than it did for Joshua...

...But we are too occupied worrying about the witchery Kahn has made nearly palpable...

...Who knows what early Scotland was all about...

...Jacobean...

...In such productions the actors alternated between being hi-fi phonographs (with the woofers turned all the way up) and fashion models...

...Duncan is all in white...

...or as a modern politico, Macbird or Macpapadoc or Macnix-indeed, somebody must already be lining up the latter for post-Watergate days...

...The pervasive witchcraft does unify the work, and not simply as a director's gimmick...

...a never-never land with idyllic heather and mists, a barren Eden...

...Unfortunately, Lee Richardson as Cassius and Wyman Pendleton as Caesar are unable to summon up the requisite authority...

...The promotion of ideological theater that spoke of its time to its time had a lot going for it in principle...

...These light discs look now like volcanic eruptions, now like lava flows, like streams of coagulating blood, like cellular organisms under a microscope, like the moon exuding vapors, the sun seen from terrifyingly near and, for one startling moment, the moon eclipsing the sun while "witchcraft celebrates/Pale Hecate's offerings...

...Within the circles slain infants and wormy corpses come into focus and fade out...

...This is the old and familiar "inconsistency" ploy, whereby critics who are too dumb or lazy to figure out what is happening burden the director with their own imaginative shortcomings...

...The anxiety is never dispelled...

...T m he crones revelations to Macbeth pour out to the accompaniment of circular projections on the back wall of the set...

...Contemporary directors cannot cope with the hags seriously, so they anticipate our sneering laughs by offering three caricatures who add up to the seamy side of Macbeth's personality...

...He does not spell out the hard, unmistakable meanings we became used to during the recent era of "relevance...

...trying to curl up like an embryo and find some recess in himself from which he need never emerge...

...By the time we get to his wife's reading of his letter, containing the witches' predictions, Kahn has sprung another complication on us: Lady Macbeth is a fourth member of the coven...

...Nor is Rosemary Murphy's Lady Macbeth, a tawny-haired, fetchingly distressed young woman...

...The power of good is symbolized by the crucifix, while for the power of evil Kahn deploys the cruciform dagger or sword...

...The play staggers along until Michael Levin as antony revives it...

...In this way the witches will accomplish their plan, nothing less than the displacement of good (King Duncan) by the enthronement of evil...

...Did it look like the original Murk...

...They stay remote...

...Brutus and Cassius bob up, then Caesar, then antony, then Cassius and Brutus again when their revolution is falling apart...

...Eleven lines later, after they have determined to accost Macbeth on the heath that same day, they slip back into their places and the activities that have continued behind them...

...Kahn implies it in the witchcraft's repercussions...

...Good actors go where the opportunities are...

...In violent contrast to the set's modernity, the costumes by Jane Greenwood recall the past...

...Lady Macbeth's, for example, is late-16th-century, with a white ruff that curves around behind her head, and a bodice tantalizingly slit down to the waist, giving us no chance to mistake her for the Virgin Queen...

...But there is time...

...In this version a dazed-almost mesmerized-hero realizes he cannot survive, long before he compares himself with the "poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage...

...In this instance they seem to be enchanted, will-less, for that environment is saturated in witchcraft...

...Square-cut and frigid-modern, they are sheathed in pressed-steel sheets of the kind that form the decor of many office buildings, subway cars, remodeled kitchens, and coffee shops--a surface that reflects back hazy distortions of what is happening in front of it and stoutly resists dirt, wear and people...

...Over the entire production there looms that sense of danger-a threat far more disturbing than the presence of Macbeth-that artaud believed to be a necessary ingredient of true theater...

...and the men's cuirasses, like the sets, are silver-gray steel plate...

...WE HaVE left even further behind the eras when Shakespeare's plays served for exercises in elocution and beautiful stage compositions...

...they suggested that Kahn did not know how to use Schmidt's scenery...

...In the final scene, when Malcolm is declared King, the three witches help him on with his coronation robe and squat before him in a mockery of obeisance, like toads...

...The next best scene is Levin's "Friends, Romans, countrymen" tub-thumper, that Periclean orgy of whipping up a crowd and playing it like an instrument...

...it marks his passage into evil...

...Much as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in England have made plays of the past into oracles that eloquently dissect 20th-century Britain, so Kahn has located his Macbeth in a timeless america, with the costumes and sets respectively standing for our Puritan beginnings and puritanical present...

...It still lacks the roster of all-around players necessary to challenge comparison with the great troupes of Europe...

...Still, Kahn's Macbeth reminds us that the company at Stratford, for years under the respectable, colorless regimen of its producer, Joseph Verner Reed Sr., is improving tremendously...

...they part and come together again like an animal trap...

...Kahn refrains from substituting for it a huge, suspended dagger, but one can almost picture the unshown weapon as what Macbeth calls "a dagger of the mind, a false creation...

...he was unnecessary...

...Several days later, when a TV camera sneaked up close to H. R. Haldeman's frightened eyes after Lowell Weicker had produced an incriminating memo, I was reminded of Weaver with a bloodstained knife in his hand ("How is't with me when every noise appals me...

...Or they conceive of a three-woman chorus that heightens the suspense by tipping us off that Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane and that Macbeth will be brought low by some stalwart who was not of woman born...

...We are worlds away from the idiocies of MacBird...

...In the duel at the end the partition remains opens, a jagged frame for Macbeth's defeat and humiliation...

...When Macbeth wonders, "Is this a dagger which I see before me...

...Its two sections, instead of having straight edges, are saw-toothed...

...Wright tries for an awesome opening-like the materialization of the witches in Macbeth-by introducing the soothsayer first, well before he warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March...

...The only exceptions are the cloaks worn by Macbeth and his queen after their accession...

...The setting is another open question...

...at the same time, in Michael Levin's vibrant performance, Macduff flings doors open, so that this burst of agitation, combined with the angry tolling of the bell, can be understood both as signaling the King's death and as an attempt to frighten away spirits, to make them fly out of the castle...

...With the appearance of Macduff after the murder of the King, we gain a spurious feeling of relief...

...as he shakes hands very deliberately with each of them we wonder whether he may not lose control and spin one of them over his shoulder in a judo throw...

...we watch them dispassionately...

...Even so, a dramatic pattern might have been salvaged-the rise and fall of a gallery of potential strongmen-if each of these figures had his inspired moments...

...this usurper is no upstart...

...Soldiers trample the fields of Philippi to the rhythms of MGM-Roman battle music, wearing handsome, padded-leather outfits that make them look like animated club chairs...

...In a way, we should feel sorry for this Macbeth...

...We have never had a shortage of acting talent in this country, for all the malicious talk about Method quirks, and Fritz Weaver's return to Stratford is a healthy sign...

...as Richard III, the power-grabber turning paranoid under attacks of ghosts and guilt...

...Yet they remain...

...Steel doors, three times the height of a human being, open and close electronically...

...and the Casca of Rex Everhart rings only minor changes on his Porter in Macbeth...

...Weaver is an instinctively big performer who can rant and thunder, sustain an ominous pause until the tension of it grows unbearable, and strike outrageously broad poses without solidifying into ham...

...The outfits of Banquo's murderers are from about 75 years later, conventional Puritan blouses, pants, hats, and boots...

...and directors like Michael Kahn create those opportunities...

...these are blood-red...

...that is how and why they remain good...

...But his Macbeth is not the center of interest...

...Something of those outdated notions survives in another offering at Stratford, a Julius Caesar directed by Garland Wright...

...Or a Tartarean cavern where the natural and supernatural closed and clashed...

...From my own responses I gauge that Kahn is making demands on his audiences, calling on their initiative...

...that is the essence of his drama, that he is not his own master...

...a huge steel crucifix hangs over the early scenes...

...Kahn, however, creates witches who are really spooky because they are for real, a trio of Scottish ladies who form a little coven...

...It was not so much that he felt instructed as that he had no contribution to make...

...From the days when he directed lonesco off-Broadway {The New Tenant and Victims of Duty) to his staging two years ago of Middle-ton's Women Beware Women-an inordinately difficult drama that he turned into a show piece for a group of student actors from the Juilliard School-to this season, he has grown steadily and purposefully as an artist without depending on flashy business...

...The spectator watched uncomfortably...

...we gather he confusedly sees a dagger that may also be a cross...

...but he does not sustain the prophetic (or any other) note, and the play loses a possible center...

...By the time the principal conspirators commit suicide, they are merely imitating the production...

...To the encounter with Macbeth they go masked and disguised?otherwise he would recognize them...

...It is then that the spell starts taking effect, and he becomes their agent in some larger plan he is unable to reckon with...

...Detaching themselves casually from a grouping of courtiers as the play begins, they could be the three graces—until Lady angus quietly utters literature's most famous opening line to Lady Caithness and a dowager: "When shall we three meet again...

...Hearing John Ehr-lichman praise sobriety, cleanliness and domestic harmony at the same time that he and his lawyer argued the President's right to break into private premises, I thought of Ms...

...as Othello, with Lady Macbeth as Iago (and Scotland as the hapless Desdemona...

...at the american Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut...

...Like characters in the naturalistic drama of the late 19th-century, they are creatures of their environment...

...Didn't some director not long ago hurl the whole thing into the future and create a neolithic, science-fiction morality play...