There are plenty of compensatory histrionics from Judith Howarth’s Lady Macbeth, ratcheted up to peak villainess, a femme very much fatale. At the peak of trauma during the banquet scene, he knocks over a chair – carefully. So wholesome a Macbeth – squeamish over the slain Banquo’s severed head, baffled by his wife’s murderous instructions – offers little psychological foothold and still less drama. Musically it’s great, but dramatically less satisfying. Even so, only in a glorious ‘Pieta, rispetto, amore’ do we get a sense of a showman at work, crafting his own obituary, shaping his own myth. Bluff and warm, all comradely decency, he sings with disarming directness and a pleasantly grainy texture. The company have scored something of a coup in Albanian baritone Gezim Myshketa’s Macbeth. This is a big score in a small space, with two monumental roles at its centre: there’s nowhere to hide. Gone are last year’s digital compromises, replaced by a full-force Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, surging out of the pit in great waves of brass and strings under conductor Francesco Cilluffo. Verdi’s early tragedy – the first of the composer’s Shakespeare adaptations – is a bold choice to open the Festival’s first “normal” season since Covid. Both they and the set are quickly reduced to a novelty frame for an essentially traditional staging. As they seize books and (inevitably) tear and scatter pages, they could be plotting their own bloody re-write, scripting a satisfying alternative story. Director Maxine Braham has conjured a coven of polite young goths and emos, busy cramming for their next essay crisis in fishnets and Victorian blouses, leather and corsets. Here at the Grange Festival, however, the impression is that something wicked went to Girton, or possibly St Hilda’s.
Macbeth act 4 scene 3 skin#
It doesn’t matter whether they’re grotesque or glam: they should make your skin prickle, leave you in no doubt that something wicked this way comes. Verdi’s witches – promoted from Shakespeare’s supporting role to become the third partner in the Macbeths’ marriage, the driving force in their downfall – have taken every form on stage, from Phyllida Lloyd’s exotic shamans at the Royal Opera to nuns at English Touring Opera and Myra Hindley-alikes at Glyndebourne. An arm appears, hair, hands, until gradually the bodies resolve themselves into people – or are they? In the centre is a writhing heap of human flesh. We’re in a dilapidated library – curved wooden shelves stretch right up to the ceiling, a spiral staircase leads to an upper gallery.
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