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Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Terry Hands for Clwyd Theatr Cymru Company) at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold, North Wales, May 2008

It is hard to avoid clichés in the opening scene of Macbeth, familiar as it is from performance, parody and the visual arts. Short of turning the witches into tongue-chewing dustmen, what can a director do these days? Terry Hands, in the recent production at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, managed to jolt the audience into attentiveness by beginning with a totally unexpected and extremely loud clap of thunder in the darkness, after which hell opened up from beneath the earth: choking smoke and beams of light poured upwards through trapdoors in the stage, along with the witches, who emerged writhing and began to incant with daemonic energy. The almost bare, black space of the stage or the world was brought eerily alive by voices, menacing movement and the shifting of localized lights in the darkness. This powerful beginning set the tone and pace for an intense and dynamic performance of Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, and certainly meant that the actors had the audience’s full, if anxiously breathless, attention. The key to the interpretation of the play lay in this short opening scene. Each witch had one side of her face obscured, covered with a shadowy effect resembling a cobweb of scars. They were ominous, identically anonymous, and they bobbed and swooped like birds of prey. Not only did they emerge from the underworld, but so too did the ‘‘bloody man’’ returning from the battle. We were made to understand from the beginning that evil forces were in control and that human nature was either their pawn or indeed a part of their kingdom. The transition from the first to the second scene involved the lone soldier being swirled around by the witches, dizzyingly, until he arrived at centre stage and they disappeared, leaving him to introduce the moment at which the narrative of events begins. This power of the witches to twist and change the patterns of human existence was evoked again at the end of the play in a deliberate echo of the opening, when Macbeth, in his fight with Macduff, was not killed offstage but flung around the stage by the ever-whirling witches. It was as though they were the warped images of Fortune turning the wheel of life, over which human beings had no control and to which they were pinned mercilessly. At the very end of the play, when Malcolm resumed the Scottish throne, the witches arrived on the scene with Fleance; these were no neutral figures of fate but powers poised to intervene in history. The couple whose lives are trapped at the centre of the witches’ web were played by two superbly accomplished actors. Owen Teale’s Macbeth strode across the stage like a true warrior, ruggedly muscular in physique and genuinely perplexed by the promises of political greatness. Even as he became king, swapping his soldier’s tunic for a white satin robe, he began to look awkward: the new robes did indeed seem borrowed. His descent into madness was palpable, measured in changes of gesture, constraint in the voice, and