Corpus Christi Playroom
Tuesday 2 - Saturday 6 December
Dir. Celeste Dring; Revived Emmanuel Dramatic Society

Four Stars

Go and see Macbett if you've read Macbeth, or if you haven't. Celeste Dring's presentation of Ionesco's savage parody manages both to stand alone and at the same time look backwards to its Renaissance roots and forwards to its impact on the twentieth-century stage.

An example: Macbett's disdain of the witches' prophecy, that he will never be killed by "one of woman born," is undercut not by the Shakespearean revelation that MacDuff was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped," but by Ionesco's replacement, that he was born of a gazelle who took on the form of the woman. Impeccable satire if you know the Shakespeare; and if you don't, then the mimed transformation of the gazelle and the creation of its child, acted next to the Macbett / Macduff confrontation, provided another level of irony and parody. Either way, the contrast of the comic gazelle-plot and the tragic Macbett plot is ensured.

This juxtaposition of mime and action was maintained throughout this performance, and it was in the unspoken dialogues that the cast excelled. The admiration of Amy Harrison's Lady Duncan for Laurie Doering's posing Macbett, the murder of George Minns' Duncan by his wife and ‘friends', Duncan peering at the non-existent sword as it ran him through: all of these were superbly styled. Jenny Maudsley's facial expressions were the best of a good bunch, sufficiently over the top to make them sinister; and generally it was when the production went all-out that it reached its intriguing best.

But it was this emphasis on the absurdist, the minimalist, that often threatened to leave the play only with its farcical re-writing. The invisible blood on the invisible dagger, the painted faces: I was often left searching for some sort of humanity in which to locate the tragic potential I felt should be present. But ultimately it's difficult to criticise any performance of this play, since who the hell knows what it's supposed to mean anyway? Dring's interpretation is a damnably entertaining way to spend an hour and a bit of your evening; it also opens up the possibilities and questions of this kind of theatre, leaving the audience (well me, at least) at a loss what to think. See it for yourself, and you'll see what I mean.

Toby Chadd