NEW YORK -- Patrick Stewart's suave performance in the Chichester Festival Theatre production of "Macbeth," which opened Tuesday at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, can be scored a triumph, but it comes with a few provisos.
Hardly anyone ever gets this most tempting of Shakespearean roles right. By comparison, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear -- tough as they are to pull off -- are more amenable to partial successes. When actors fail in these parts, they tend to fail upward.
The Scottish play, on the other hand, can really be hellish for its leading man. Don't believe me? Ask Kelsey Grammer, Alec Baldwin, Christopher Plummer or any of the other big name Macbeths of the last couple of decades and you'll find out why theater people say the tragedy is cursed.
The play requires a kind of cinematic facility of its director, who must agilely negotiate between close-ups and special effects. Rupert Goold's staging may ride roughshod over the text's subtler psychology, yet it spectacularly captures the moral inversion of a society in which a celebrated military hero can rapidly transform into a fiendish butcher.
The production clocks in at just under three hours, but business is briskly transacted. The upside is that audience members aren't given many opportunities to check their watches; the downside is that there's not always sufficient space for the protagonist's moments of fleeting circumspection.
This is "Macbeth" as arty action movie, beautifully spoken by a cast that seems relatively at home in the modernist whirlwind Goold has conjured. And Stewart, a veteran of Shakespeare as well as sci-fi blockbusters such as the "Star Trek" and "X-Men" franchises, looks like he was born for this sort of adventurous approach to the Bard of Avon.
The setting is a sleekly industrial kitchen. Tougher to pin down is the era, which suggests some crazy mishmash of Stalin's Russia and a timeless Great Britain (more England than Scotland, if the accents are any gauge).
Thankfully, the update doesn't make a mockery of the tale. The set (designed with diabolical flexibility by Anthony Ward, who's also responsible for the costumes) is liberally splattered with gore, as expected. But much of the violence is conveyed through Lorna Heavey's chillingly real video projections of wide-ranging military madness.
