I played Lady Macbeth in C Company’s recent product of Macbeth. The Stage reviewed it and said some nice things.
The C Company’s brisk Macbeth, performed within the time constraints of a lunch hour, captures the relentless speed of Shakespeare’s shortest play with minimal sacrifices of clarity and characterisation.
In this modern dress staging, Edward Nelson’s Macbeth is seen first as a callow prince of the city, whose baptism by blood leaves him a broken and pessimistic cynic, while Emma Powell’s sensuous Lady Macbeth, for whom the “Unsex me here” invocation is almost orgasmic, proves too brittle and fragile to survive without her husband’s support.
Textual trimming is intelligent and unobtrusive, the largest cuts including Duncan’s scenes, Banquo’s murder, and the Macduff family, all covered by later dialogue, and Malcolm’s self-slander, while the ever-present witches double as various nobles, servants and messengers.
The updating doesn’t all work, the weakest touch being the introduction of the witches as a hen party after some serious drinking, while some staging, like the raising of the prophesying spirits, is more murky than evocative. But director Aileen Gonsalves and the cast are to be credited for natural and colloquial line readings throughout that give a freshness and reality to familiar speeches.