Macbeth ISF 2018

Or: Witch’n It Old School

“Walk into my castle like ‘What up? I am a big Scot.’

Gotta tell the missus ‘bout the missives that the witches brought

Unseam’n Norway’ns, bring’n Kerns to slaughter,

Till Duncan cries, ‘Glamis! Thou’t should be the Thane of Cawdor!”

—Is not how the 2018 iteration of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s batwing’d Macbeth goes. With it’s staging in a traditional Elizabethan round, its warriors sporting dour and sensible kilts, and a timeless, spine-tingling soundscape of drums, chimes, and metallic shrieks. Nothing remotely contemporary here, folks. We’ve gone back to an age of firelight, or cold and steal, of gods and demons.

The demons are most certainly in evidence. The Production’s witches, with their long membrane appendages, loom large throughout the proceedings, either in slow and chilling tableaux or unsettling spider-like scuttling. There is a moment where, accompanied by the corals of wagons and the shrieks of bats they maneuver themselves over a fallen corpse and lower their heads to feed, at which point one’s cultivated and objective hair-tingling fantods drops right into the damp cellar where one keeps the universal feeling of the heebie-jeebies. But their spindly presence is lashed around the very solid and fixed point of our Scotsman (Lynn Robert Berg). Berg is a rooted presence, a magnetic point captivating our attention without any shenanigans, apt for executing a flawlessly smooth gesture (a toss of the crown, a quarter turn tracking his prey) or a bestial contortion. His voice is a rich, nuanced wine, poured purring sweet and clear into our ears; his handling of the text masterful though his sentences often break in the middle and hare of in new directions, sometimes arresting, sometimes darkly comedic, sometimes just … odd. But it keeps his steady during his free fall and crowd surf into villainy, which is longer and more demanding journey commonly booked: for Berg’s Macbeth the encounter of the blasted heath doesn’t plant a seed of evil as give supernatural permission for plots he’s cultivated for a long time.

The sharp cheese paired with this strong wine is Erin Partin, a restless and vociferous Lady M. Like a cat before a thunderstorm she prowls around the set, wrapping herself around her partner or pouncing and shying sudden moments. Everything about her performance is tether hooked, wound up with passion and running over with feeling. The second greatest laugh in the show (after Young Siward’s post-mortem diss) is when, in the middle of the worst dinner party ever, Lady M just gives up and sinks to the floor, totally deadpanned, hollow-voiced, and not even trying to keep up appearances. It’s deeply amusing but is also a sad example of one who tried too hard and lost everything. Another fine and unconventional take is Jonathan Dyrud’s Banquo, who here shows off his powers not as a stalwart soldier but a too loyal friend, doing his best to cover for Macbeth’s scheme-y lapses and protect him from himself, until he goes too far.

The play sometimes lacks artifice: a too intense desire to hide incriminating objects like daggers or severed heads from the principals, or an inability to correct certain performances that do not only reject the guidance of Shakespeare’s verse but actively fight it, bludgeoning its poor open feet with what is supposed to pass for wild emotion. But in the moments that matter the play hits with a good clean crack of heart of bat to center of ball and hits it straight out of the park. In keeping with the eternal, primordial nature of the productions these knockouts come in moments of summoning. The raised octagon in the stage's center is sacred ground, not entered lightly and only with something to sacrifice. Partin gives us chills as she carefully places a foot on it, ready to become one of them murdering ministers. Macbeth splays, electrified, as he howls from it, tearing away any shreds of humanity. MacDuff climbs on to brim up with righteous rage and Malcolm (special note to Jeffery C. Hawkins for giving some spine and spice to a notoriously bland and unpliable character. Well done) pauses, finding some king-becoming graces within himself. And for course no moment finer than in the midst of the simmer of an upcoming battle, Berg is riveted to the circle with a perfectly simple and clear, “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” What a silence there. Timeless and eternal.