Nine minutes of battle. No prophecy. No heath. No sisters. The plot is kept on hold until the bloodshed is over – it would be comic, if it were not. Then the supernatural arrives, out of a puddle, as a humanoid shape looting itself into being. Nothing here is called a witch, and nothing is sent from outside: the creatures ooze from the characters themselves.
The recipients of the non-verbal prophecy vomit a black viscous something, and it is the same something the creatures are made of, – the same that will later seep from the walls and more. Evil is not agency here, yet substance – secreted by the body, wiped away in a hustle, hidden under the carpet, refusing to stay hidden, less as oil than as excrement.
The casting is the argument. Lionel Lingelser plays Lady M. Sophie Botte plays Banquo. Delphine Cottu plays Duncan, grotesquely padded, and also Fleance, and also Lady Makduff: one body carries the king, the child and the mother, – all the victims wearing the same face under a different mask. All damaged beyond repair – obesity, mental health, incest.
Duncan arrives, the welcome dinner plays over Feel so good by Bobby Harden and the Soulful Saints, the plot advances on Kiss you all over by Exile, and the king appears to be choking, ‘gleefully’ yet against Shakespearean intent. The music is not ironic distance. The feast is a real good time, which is what makes the murder unbearable rather than inevitable.
Louis Arene does not stage his Makbeth to instruct us about despotism, or ambition. Munstrum’s is not a theatre of catastrophe and cruelty, yet of laughter and surprise. Theirs is “a quest for Joy”, – the somber kneaded through the luminous, hence it delivers a mise en scène which could be an abattoir as well as a fun for fun party. And it is an act of endurance.
The parts emphasised en travesti are the finest, and the soundtrack belongs to a rainbow club. The gaiety — in both senses, and here they are not separable — is not relief from the horror; it is the company’s stated method for subsisting on it. The drag does not undercut the tragedy, it informs and shapes the production in the search for joy.
The Fool in the hands of a circus performer is intriguing, yet the intermezzo itself is harder to defend. It pauses to apologise, on the grounds that Shakespeare might turn in his grave – a concept which is explained in the language of the poet himself. Yet irreverence without corruption of the folio earns the right to be outright, without need of permission.
The passage through the Makbeths’ farewells is welcomed by Need you tonight (Kick) by INXS – introducing to the antechamber of full-wide madness and sleepwalking. The creatures that wrap around him and drag him down are the same black matter, returned for the body that produced it. She goes the same way, but her descent is a tad more drag than his.
The king is now naked. In a sublime rebirth without words, the produce is shame. Wearing the crown as Gollum would wear the ring – the same posture, he is now exposed. Then the fallacious gift of a dismembered mirror – from the crowned head on, returning the black matter to the ground it came from, — a triumph that looks like a hangover.
The most flamboyant expression of a fight for light.
Shakespearean Tales 