Iron Thane

MACBETH by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Macbeth articulates a gangrenous world where leadership is a pretext for ambition and power an end in itself. It is all there in the text, but too often the hysterical wife and the weird sisters upstage the man's essential corruption and Macbeth turns into the lady's play.

The energetic Scotsman Nicol Williamson has swung a deadly claymore at this flawed reading. At the Royal Shakespeare Company's Aldwych Theater in London, he portrays Macbeth as an anti-hero of feral self-knowledge and focuses on the play's real theme: the psychological disintegration of a man who would be king but discovers that as a murderer he can only be a tyrant. When Williamson and Director Trevor Nunn did their first version at Stratford last year it was encrusted with hoodoo gimmickry and medieval fatalism. Now they have cut to the quick.

Race to Doom. Wearing spurred boots, jodhpurs and black military tunics, Williamson and a cast of toughs speak in Lowland Scots to accent the masculine hardness of Shakespeare's verse. The witches are haggard cockney washerwomen offering a willing Macbeth a potion distilled from the slops of his own ambition. Helen Mirren's Lady Macbeth is a useful foil: an oversexed and undersatisfied vixen in form-fitting velvet.

But Williamson's performance provides the chief engine of the play's race to doom (two hours without an intermission). Swordplay and stage business have been slashed and ghosts reduced to the actors' imaginations, all to emphasize verse. Williamson speaks with a strangled intensity that shows a man totally aware of what he is doing yet too weak to stop. The key to his projection lies in his iron control over the poetic rhythms. He instructs Banquo's murderers with a flat naturalism that echoes the White House tapes, then whiningly rationalizes his supposed invincibility while twiddling a now useless dagger. As the armies close in, he crouches fetus-like at the foot of his throne and, in choked pauses, speaks the play's final nihilistic soliloquy.

Laurence Olivier once summed up the play: "The man knows everything, the woman nothing." Williamson demonstrates, step by bloody step, how Macbeth comes by his awful knowledge.

qed Lawrence Malkin

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