Macbeth

So much of London's theater scene is trying to be innovative. Various venues, warehouse spaces, the upper floors of pubs, and the occasional abandoned underground station or town hall basement are awash with immersive experiences, stories told through dance, or occasionally an overlap of both. But as Philip Pullman writes in His Dark Materials, without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all. And at its heart, theater must not forget the human need for narrative.

I am reminded of this as I watch Flabbergast Theatre's utterly engrossing interpretation of Macbeth, a show that deftly manages to balance foregrounding a violently compelling story with a fresh and rivetingly chaotic presentation.

Flabbergast firmly roots - in a few senses - this Scottish bloodbath in a musky, dusky, earthy atmosphere, thick with dusty, particulate clouds of clay floating through the air and smeared over the main players' faces like so much war paint.

As you enter the performance space in Southwark Playhouse the principal performers are already clustered together, chanting, babbling, cackling and gleefully gurgling in a bacchanalian cacophony of noise, moving in a carefully structured destructive dance that is mayhem manifest through movement, building through the violent force of gigantic motherdrums being walloped as a call to war, building an atmosphere of danger and trepidation.

One gets the sense that with clouds of earth constantly floating in the space around us, we are never far from the pit of a grave opening up and swallowing someone else, as is appropriate for a play with such a high body count.

From opening to closing scenes we are reminded of Orson Wells' iconically stylized adaptation of this tale of power and betrayal, the famed opening moments depicting the eponymous character as little more than a lump of clay to be molded, shaped, toyed with, melted away and destroyed by those murdering ministers, the three witches.

In this show, the witches are rightly foregrounded, never off-stage and the actors playing them nimbly doubling as sinister agents of chaos and as, variously, Lady Macbeth (with intense control and raw power by Briony O'Callaghan), Ross (with a taut and fragile sense just on the dark side of mayhem by Vyte Garriga) and Lennox and Lady MacDuff (by Paulina Krzeczhowska, with a mirthful and frighteningly knowing sense of mischief), masterfully utilizing their physicality to switch between parts and to force the emphasis on to the gendered connotations of much of the narrative and to fully place the power in the hands of the female characters.

Also very deserving of honorable mention, the laugh-out-loud funniest and then most sinister, gleefully malicious assassin I have seen in a production of the Scottish play. Credit must be given in this case also to the very clever decision making and direction, cutting away a lot of the recondite references in the original text and setting Dale Wylde free to do what he likes with the character, and doing it both entertainingly and unnervingly!

All hail Flabbergast, for bringing this story to us in a fresh and dangerous and exciting way that allows us to connect to the untamed nature of the text.

And though O'Callaghan is utterly compelling in throaty glee and lust for power, I do wish she'd taken a little more time to relish the lines of the famously manipulative Lady Macbeth as many are rather spat out in quick succession instead of brought to a slow bubbling boil in the dark as Shakespeare intended.

It hardly pulls one out of the bloody night of violence and excess that challenges and compels and exceeds our most macabre expectations.

Don't forget to check out the attached Francis Baconesque art exhibition, thematically linked to the show by mega-talented Marina Rennee-Cemmick, within the charming confines of the Playhouse itself.

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