THEATER REVIEW

Murderer, King and Scot, All Rolled Into One Madman

Alan Cumming in ‘Macbeth’ at Lincoln Center Festival

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: July 8, 2012

The title character’s divided nature, torn between ambition and honor, blood lust and guilt, has been shattered into splinters in the new production of “Macbeth” at the Rose Theater. The charismatic Scottish actor Alan Cumming portrays not only the murderous general, but also every other major role in a reimagining of this classic tragedy as the frenzied outpourings of a diseased, disintegrating mind.

Although it is low on actors — Mr. Cumming shares the stage with only two performers, who mostly remain silent — this innovative production, directed by John Tiffany (“Black Watch,” “Once”) and Andrew Goldberg as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, is plenty high on concept. Originally seen at the National Theater of Scotland, this stripped-down version of the play is set in a mental hospital, a drama of ambition and retribution becoming a feverish nightmare replayed, presumably forever, by a madman lost in a maze of language. The play’s first line of dialogue — the witch’s query “When shall we three meet again?” — is in this version also its last, as the limp, exhausted man onstage begins his elaborate ritual of self-torment anew.

In a wordless preamble Mr. Cumming shuffles onstage in the company of two actors clad as hospital attendants (Ali Craig and Myra McFadyen, who later speak some of the doctor’s and the gentlewoman’s lines from Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene). Looking disoriented and confused, Mr. Cumming stares vacantly around him — at the shining mint-green walls, the industrial-looking bath and sink — as he is stripped of bloodstained clothing that is carefully placed in evidence bags. Having collected forensic evidence of some unspecified violent crime from under his fingernails (a grisly, effective touch) and redressed him in formless hospital garb, these silent minders then march out of the room, to return only at occasional intervals to calm his hysterics with an injection, more often monitoring his behavior from a room looking down on the ward.

Many small roles have been excised, and the text has been trimmed to focus on the key points in the plot and the famous soliloquies — and to avoid too much back and forth between characters that might turn Mr. Cumming’s performance into a gaudy split-personality turn. But the play’s contours remain strongly enough defined that we can follow Mr. Cumming’s shifts from role to role with little confusion. Or perhaps I should say little more confusion than is intended: being in the presence of a lunatic — even one so eloquently blessed with the gift of language — is surely meant to induce at least a little disorientation in the observer.

Three video screens above the stage also help clarify transitions in the dialogue. When Macbeth and Banquo first encounter the witches, for example, Mr. Cumming turns away from the audience and slides into a wide-legged crouch to deliver the witches’ lines, while his face can be seen twisted into sly grimaces on the screens above. To distinguish his jaunty Banquo from Macbeth, Mr. Cumming fondles a red apple.

But mostly Mr. Cumming employs merely his voice and his nimble, sinewy body to transform himself from a preening, pompous King Duncan (a reading that rather departs from Shakespeare’s noble figure); to an unusually neurotic, soft-spoken, hand-wringing Macbeth; to a lusty Lady Macbeth, first seen luxuriating in a bath as she reads of her husband’s strange encounter with the witches and his sudden ascension to the title of Thane of Cawdor.

A few hoary gothic touches notwithstanding — the creepy-looking doll occasionally used to represent Duncan’s son Malcolm — the production is marvelously designed. The set by Merle Hensel has a soul-deadening, antiseptic air that might drive even the sanest of us just a little bonkers; the lighting, by Natasha Chivers, moves from harsh and clinical to flickery and shadow-strewn as the tragedy gains momentum and the central figures enter more deeply into its horrors; the complex video design by Ian William Galloway plays its own eerie tricks; and the music, by Max Richter, is haunting and propulsive.

Of course the most audience-pleasing special effects all come courtesy of Mr. Cumming (a Tony winner for “Cabaret” in 1998). The scenes in which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are at loggerheads — when he quails before the killing the king, only to be lashed into commitment by his wife’s hissing contempt, or the banquet scene, in which she nervously tries to cover for his hysteria at the vision of Banquo’s ghost — are natural tour-de-force moments that Mr. Cumming pulls off with juicy aplomb. He virtually makes love to himself during one of these fraught encounters, flipping between the lord and his lady with almost comical finesse.

Despite these and other flourishes, Mr. Cumming never does too much huffing and puffing to show how hard he’s working. The performance has a smooth virtuosity that plays down the gimmickry and illuminates how Macbeth’s mind is a tangled nest of both noble and evil impulses.

And yet the formidable dramatic power of this Shakespeare tragedy never emerges very strongly. Inevitably the conflicts that fuel the play — between Macbeth and his foes, Macbeth and his wife, Macbeth and the brutal fate his actions have brought about — feel muted by the one-man, many-voices concept. (As it happens, this is not the first solo “Macbeth” I’ve seen. I caught the British actor Stephen Dillane’s simpler, more cerebral version in Los Angeles in 2004.)

More significant, Mr. Cumming never establishes the gravity and ferocity that Macbeth, Shakespeare’s heroic villain, ultimately achieves. As the equivocal Macbeth of the early scenes, still susceptible to the dictates of honor, he is perfectly convincing. But the dead-hearted figure of the play’s later scenes lacks the horrific majesty — or majestic horror — that gives the character such awful stature.

Mr. Cumming delivers the verse with lucidity and intelligence, and it is undeniably pleasing to hear the Scottish play performed with an authentic Scottish accent. But his rendering of Macbeth’s culminating burst of pure nihilism — the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy — comes across more as a petulant screed than the brutal philosophy of a heart drained of every last drop of humanity.

The production holds our focus with its clever use of macabre devices to animate the drama: Mr. Cumming pulls from an evidence bag a small boy’s sweater that is used piteously to symbolize the murder of Macduff’s young son; and when he consults the witches to clarify their prophecies, he slowly disembowels a dead raven. And yet for all the sometimes grotesque imagery, and Mr. Cumming’s visceral performance, on an emotional level this “Macbeth” never truly draws blood.

Macbeth

By William Shakespeare; directed by John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg; sets and costumes by Merle Hensel; lighting by Natasha Chivers; sound by Fergus O’Hare; music by Max Richter; voice by Ros Steen; movement director, Christine Devaney; video by Ian William Galloway. A National Theater of Scotland production, presented by the Lincoln Center Festival, Nigel Redden, director. At the Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway; (212) 721-6500, lincolncenterfestival.org. Through Saturday. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

WITH: Alan Cumming, Ali Craig and Myra McFadyen.