While stages are closed nationwide, we will have to settle for filmed past performances from mostly British and Canadian companies such as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford Festival. The latter two are streaming previous incarnations of wildly different Macbeths. Shakespeare’s Globe’s version of the Scottish Play is a pared-down 90-minute edition for high-school students. The performance captured takes place on a rainy day with the kids standing in the open pit in rain gear and getting wet because of the open roof structure, recreating the original Globe from the Bard’s days. The dismal weather provides a fitting backdrop for director Cressida Brown’s ghoulish production. The witches emerge from a pile of dead bodies and later pull fetuses out of the leftovers from Macbeth’s banquet to add to their hellish cauldron.
Division between Scotland and England are given contemporary resonance. Ekow Quartey delivers a muscular, threatening Macbeth, and Elly Condron adds a dimension of feminine, maternal love to the usually devilish Lady Macbeth who is pregnant in this staging.
