A new production of Macbeth shows that innovative stagings of classic plays sometimes work superbly, and that a rare occurrence of an anti-statist point of view makes for an enlightening and exhilarating experience.

 Patrick Steward evokes the ghost of Stalin in 'Macbeth'

Andrew Stuttaford’s superb National Review Online review of a new Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart shows how truly superior works of art have rich implications for all human beings, however far removed from the circumstances of their origins.

Stuttaford writes: 

The most distinctive thing about this Macbeth may be the way that it is haunted not by one ghost, but two. We never see the second. It is glimpsed only in hint, in gesture, in the laughter that accompanies a savage joke, in flickering newsreel of past parades and, mostly, in our own memories of the cruelties of all our day-before-yesterdays, cruelties which Shakespeare never lived long enough to see—except, perhaps, in his imagination—but which we will not, should not, live long enough to forget.

The first traces of this malign presence can be detected in the appearance of the soldiers in the opening scenes: leather coats, leather boots, flat caps, uniforms more usually associated with Kursk than Cawdor, with cattle trucks rather than cavalry. It’s evoked again by the basement, moral and physical, within which the action unfolds, a miserable space that does duty as hospital, kitchen, torture chamber, bar, palace, banqueting hall and (underlining the way that this play never escapes the lower depths—even when the drama supposedly moves outside) the moors, forests, and battlefields of Macbeth’s much contested kingdom. Huis Clos. No exit. This bunker, this arena is a bleak, clinical, claustrophobic place, its white-tiled walls efficient in a cheerless mid-century way, easy to swab down after who knows what. It’s best reached by an old-fashioned concertina-gated elevator, a mechanized entrance to some sort of hell, to the Lubyanka of our nightmares.

But it’s when we arrive at the play’s core, with Macbeth ascendant and regnant, the former king dead, and the search for traitors well underway, that this second ghost, that of Joseph Stalin, comes closest into view. Beyond a moustache, Stewart never really attempts impersonation; The rest is just suggestion, the sometimes uncanny resonance of the play’s own lines, and the adroit use that Goold makes of the gaps left between them. Thus we see Macbeth making his plans in the wake of what has clearly been a good day out at the hunt. He is pleasant, cheery, his hat pushed back at the casual angle that Stalin (a man who could pantomime relaxation) sometimes favored when out in the field. He is holding a shotgun, and as he talks, he jovially swings the weapon out towards the audience, pointing here, pointing there, randomly, precisely, playfully, maliciously, aiming at you, at me, at Banquo, at Duncan, at Bukharin, at Trotsky, at tens, at thousands, at millions.

Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood in 'Macbeth' The Guardian review of last fall’s presentation of the production in England made the same observations without explicitly making the connection to Stalin:

Lady Macbeth greets Duncan in her kitchen pinny; Banquo is murdered in a rocking railway carriage compartment; and Malcolm flees to a court where a whitetied tenor sings a Novello number. Far from being whimsical or tricksy, this roots the action in a plausible world of escalating terror to which England provides a tonal contrast.

According to this and other accounts, it seems evident that the production and performance make this connection quite openly, so Stuttaford is clearly on solid ground in his analysis. The details he provides are quite interesting and enlightening regarding the underlying truths that great art so frequently lays bare.

In so doing, works such as this production of Macbeth (according to those who have seen it) push against the relativism so common in our contemporary culture and point toward a greater understanding of human nature and the human condition. Thus they provide strong forces for cultural and social renewal.