It was odd to see Macbeth and Linda on successive evenings, given their opposing qualities. Carrie Cracknell’s production of Macbeth felt muddled in intent and production; Linda, Penelope Skinner’s new play, hammered home its message with relentless effort. Both had remarkable sets: Macbeth’s was brutally simple, Linda’s elaborate and elegant.
This Macbeth uses a stripped down text, coming in under two hours with no interval. The set, too, is stripped down. A claustrophobic concrete tunnel with a small opening at the back of the stage creates a kind of vertigo, and the occasional sliding wall completes the feeling that one is in a terrifying space. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that we are in an Abu Ghraib-like place, with body bags, traumatized heroes (Macbeth with PTSD?), and victims covered in plastic hoods before their throats are slit.
This is not a bad concept, but there were some problems (quite aside from the logic of conducting the final battle, with great Birnam wood coming to high Dunsinane, in this tunnel). Duncan appears as a pretty unsavory king in charge of this nihilistic war. Remember, though, that Macbeth hesitates to kill Duncan not just because he’s a kinsman and a king, but also because he’s a good king, who “hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been/So clear in his great office, that his virtues/Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against/The deep damnation of his taking-off….”
So we have a textual problem, and this passage was included in the 50% or so of the text that we actually heard. Malcolm, on the other hand, was a barely felt presence. (It looked to me as if the actor playing him could hardly wait to get off stage at the curtain call. I wonder if he took the job thinking he would have more than a handful of lines.) At any rate, this unsavory Duncan, coupled with a cipher for a son, suggests that it doesn’t matter who rules: brutal torture is the law of the land. A dark reading of an already dark play!
The other noteworthy aspect to this production was the omnipresence of the weird sisters, who, dressed in flesh-colored body stockings, danced throughout to loud techno music. Representing what? The disturbed psyches of the principal characters? It wasn’t entirely clear.
The production was not dull. The imagery evoking contemporary torture was gripping and powerful. John Heffernan was a masterful Macbeth, if perhaps a little too elegant for this production. Lady Macbeth underacted her part, and Macduff was entirely forgettable. Indeed, the death of his wife and children made little impression. Could this have been intentional, a statement that our personal attachments in such a world mean nothing?
So what about Linda, the new play by Penelope Skinner? If Macbeth was somewhat opaque in this realization, Linda took 2 ½ hours to hit us over the head with dialogue and plotting that was just a little too on the nose for me.
The premise: 55-year-old Linda Wilde has it all, a successful career as brand manager of a cosmetics firm, a happy marriage, and two beautiful daughters—and she still fits into the size ten she wore 15 years ago. What could possibly go wrong? Pretty much everything, as she tries to launch a new anti-aging cosmetics campaign directed at—gasp!—women over 55, instead of the more profitable younger market. Her boss shoots her down and hands over responsibility to the grasping young woman with her eyes on Linda’s job. (Yes, there is an All About Eve element to the play.)
This all provides ample opportunity for Linda to toss red meat about the invisibility of older women to the older women in the Royal Court audience. But how seriously can one take her peripeteia, her gradual realization that not all is well in the carefully constructed façade of her life? Well, to judge from discussions with others, it worked powerfully for many of my peers. I, however, felt myself being handed a feminist lesson on a platter, with an unearned dénouement—complete with Lear-like storm—that was more of a paint-by-numbers story than anything that rang true.
So what was good? Plenty, actually. The lead, Noma Dumezweni, was terrific. The set was a spectacular creation, a three-story open building, rotating as needed over a pool of water. Though most of the secondary parts were underwritten, the two daughters felt as though they might merit a story of their own. And is it a bad thing to write a play about the invisibility of older women? Of course not. I just wish it were a better play.
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