Is John Doyle the Marie Kondo of theater? The director’s predictably stripped-down Macbeth off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company (he also designed the bare-bones dark wood scenery)—which runs a fleet 1 hour and 40 minutes, sans intermission—could be called, in all sincerity, clutter-free theater. And with Shakespeare, let’s face it: The less clutter, the better.
For those wondering how that translates to Doyle’s interpretation of the Scottish play, it means there’s no supernatural fuss around the three Witches. No cauldron, no smoke, no rubbery eye of newt, no fake toe of frog…you get the picture. In fact, when Macbeth (Corey Stoll, spectacular) and Banquo (Erik Lochtefeld) first encounter the Weird Sisters, we can’t even tell who they are. Doyle has planted a half dozen or so actors around the stage, and distributed the Witches’ lines among them. “Are ye fantastical?” Banquo asks. Maybe he and Macbeth are simply crazy, he reasons: “Or have we eaten on the insane root/ That takes the reason prisoner?”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
Perhaps three witchy women did give Macbeth delusions of grandeur by hailing him “king hereafter.” But in Doyle’s production, it’s Macbeth—not some “secret, black, and midnight hags”—pulling the strings. Or, rather, it’s Lady Macbeth (a chilling Nadia Bowers, playing opposite her real-life husband, Stoll), because we know Macbeth doesn’t have the stones to do it. She’s the one who hatches the plan to murder King Duncan (Mary Beth Peil) and pin it on his clueless drunken attendants. (As for Doyle’s other cuts, they’re pretty insignificant: Head witch Hecate has bit the dust, as she often does in trimmed-down productions; and there’s no comic relief, or jokes about drinking and impotence, from the hammy Porter.)
This makes Macbeth a much more regular-guy figure—a hapless dreamer who can’t even remember to plant the murder weapon in the proper place because he’s too disturbed by the loss of his father figure. “But wherefore could I not pronounce ‘Amen’?/ I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’/ Stuck in my throat,” he cries. In that moment, Stoll’s Macbeth seems almost overwhelmed by remorse.
As the play goes on, of course, Macbeth does grow more daring. He’s soon ordering the murder of his onetime BFF Banquo—right after inviting him to a banquet! “Fail not our feast,” Macbeth says with a Cheshire-cat grin. (“Look like th’ innocent flower,” his wife told him when they were discussing doing in Duncan, “But be the serpent under ’t.” He’s finally learning.) In a particularly savage bit of role-doubling, Doyle sends Macbeth himself to butcher Lady Macduff (N’Jameh Camara), Young Macduff (Antonio Michael Woodard), and a baby. Usually we don’t see Macbeth get his hands dirty—at least not until the final battle scene—but his direct involvement adds an extra jolt to the fatal fight with Macduff (Barzin Akhavan).
Doyle’s less-is-more style means one more thing: no blood spurting everywhere during sword fights, and no triumphant final-scene decapitation. You might think that lessens the effect of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but personally, I’ll trade a prop head on a pike for a tight 100-minute telling any day.
Macbeth opened Oct. 27, 2019, and runs through Dec. 15. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
