Of Sunday and Macbeth
My yearnings for theatre were sated last week when, through luck and happenstance, I got to accompany friends to two of the most talked-about shows in New York at the moment: Sunday in the Park with George at the Roundabout Theatre and Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As events and opportunities to spend time with friends, both were completely pleasurable. As aesthetic artifacts, both were disappointing. The better of the shows in terms of script is the lesser of the shows in terms of production: Macbeth . The central problems are that the play is a hodgepodge of ideas and techniques and that Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth gives a one-note performance in the key of overwrought. (Patrick Stewart's performance is, like the whole show, occasionally extraordinary and generally competent, but lacking coherence.) The director, Rupert Goold, has chosen to put the play in quasi-Stalinist dress and on a single set: a white-tiled hospital ward-asylum-torture chamber, augmente...
