Patrick Stewart interview
From Shakespeare to sci-fi and back again: Patrick Stewart on Macbeth, resurrecting his love affair with the London stage and Trekkies in the audience...
"They arrive here and Jean-Luc Picard isn't anywhere around. Instead there's something else going on..."
Patrick Stewart is backstage at the Gielgud Theatre, musing on his sci-fi tag and the regular presence of Trekkies in the audience whenever he takes to the boards.
"We're making audiences for Shakespeare here in the West End..."
Patrick Stewart reacts to Trekkies in the audience"I meet these people afterwards, I get letters from them and see them at the stage door," he says, his mellifluous voice becoming more animated.
"And they say, 'I've never seen Shakespeare before, I didn't think I'd understand it, but it was wonderful and I can't wait to come back'.
"You know," he booms, "We're making audiences for Shakespeare here in the West End."
The 67-year-old actor has good reason to feel excited and a little pleased.
Before his Hollywood sojourn in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its big-screen spin-offs, he was the first actor to speak a line on the Barbican stage in the title role of Henry IV.
"ruling by fear"
That was back in 1981. Now he's resurrecting his love affair with the London stage and collaborating on a regular basis with the RSC, tackling Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and now, a pulse-quickening modern dress version of Macbeth.
Stewart's Macbeth is in modern dress
Rupert Goold's production, first seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre, is playing to a packed house in Shaftesbury Avenue, Stewart tells BBC London, shaking that famously hairless head of his.
"It's set in the cold war, somewhere in eastern Europe during the late Forties and early Fifties, and it came out of references in the text to having spies in people's houses, torturing people and ruling by fear."
Shakespeare's familiar tragedy has, in effect, been given a Soviet-style makeover, complete with military uniforms and footage of massed troops marching on what resembles Red Square.
Stewart and co-star Kate Fleetwood
Still, there are some things that don't change. Superstition has it you're not allowed to refer to the play by name within the theatre, lest bad luck bedevil the production.
Could the curse of the Scottish Play have struck already, at this early point in the Gielgud run?
"I had a bath delivered to my home and I'd waited five months for it, and it arrived damaged. I'm blaming the play for it!", roars Stewart in delight.
"What are we to do? We live and breathe it every day, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. Whatever happens can't be any worse than my damaged bath."
Charles Spencer reviews Patrick Stewart in Macbeth at the Minerva Theatre
Rupert Goold is a young, talented director in a hurry to make his name. Patrick Stewart is a great classical actor redeeming time lost in the profitable tosh of Star Trek and the X-Men movies. Together, they form one of the most thrilling double-acts in British theatre.
Hushed intensity and thrilling clarity: Patrick Stewart is superb as Macbeth
Those who saw it are unlikely to forget Goold's inventive staging of The Tempest for the RSC, set on a frozen island in the Arctic, with Stewart as a commanding Prospero who learns just how hard forgiveness is.
Now actor and director are reunited at Chichester in an even more sensational Macbeth that creates such a powerful atmosphere of evil that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
The show can stand comparison with Trevor Nunn's legendary staging with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench 30 years ago, a classic, freshly imagined Macbeth that will linger in the memory of all who see it.
The action is set in a bleak subterranean kitchen, complete with fridge, sink, chopping blocks, ovens, a crackling television and a service lift with great crashing metal doors. In the early battle scenes, the place is serving as a field hospital, at which the attentive nurses are suddenly revealed to be the terrifying weird sisters.
Later it is the kitchen of the Macbeths' castle, where feasts are both prepared and consumed. But we know its true location. This is a kitchen in hell.
Though notionally still set in Scotland, the production is inspired by Stalin and the Great Terror. Banquo is killed by lethal injection in a crowded jolting train carriage (evoked with characteristic panache in Goold's staging).
Grainy black-and-white film footage shows columns of tanks and goose-stepping soldiers. A patriotic anthem is sung in Russian before the feast, the decent Ross is tortured by secret policemen. This is the world that inspired Orwell's 1984 and which remains nightmarishly persistent today.
The production is full of sudden illuminations and jolting surprises. The banquet at which Banquo appears as a ghost is staged twice, once through Macbeth's eyes, so we actually see the blood-gouted horror, once through that of the other guests, so Macbeth seems to be screaming at thin air.
The terror of the murder of Macduff's family is conjured merely by the ominous sound of a thug unpeeling gaffer tape. And in the sleepwalking scene, the kitchen tap suddenly runs with blood, even as Lady Macbeth tries to clean her hands with bleach.
The performances are superb. Stewart delivers the great soliloquies with hushed intensity and thrilling clarity, taking us right inside the mind of a man who understands the importance of virtue and morality, but is nevertheless seduced by the terrible lure of power.
We also watch him discovering that further killing is the only way to quieten his conscience, until he is left only with the bitter, exhausted nihilism of the great last act.
The shifting balance of power between Macbeth and his wife is thrillingly caught, too. In the early scenes, it is Kate Fleetwood's sexy, scarily strong-willed Lady Macbeth who is in command, with Stewart seeming weak in comparison.
But he grows in deadly strength even as her mind begins to crack, and by the end there is a desert of emptiness between them.
Among the supporting cast Michael Feast's Macduff is unforgettably moving, the long silence with which he greets the news of the death of his family almost unbearable in its tension, while Scott Handy even manages to make the usually deeply tedious Malcolm interesting.
Two days on, this production still haunts my memory like a vivid nightmare that taints the waking day.
Rupert Goold’s production of "Macbeth" opens with the Bloody Sergeant on a hospital trolley, burbling his news and expiring while receiving a transfusion from nurses who turn out to be witches. Later, these hatchet-faced women become the Macbeths’ hatchet-holding skivvies, then waitresses at the Macbeths’ feast. Meanwhile, the dour, brick-lined ER department becomes a kitchen (with Lady Macbeth in an apron), a torture-chamber (with Ross as victim), and a morgue (with body-bags containing the witches’ apparitions). You can’t accuse Goold of lacking imaginative boldness.
But questions must be asked of a revival that won uniform raves at Chichester during my summer break. Isn’t it desperately busy and sometimes distractingly fussy? It amazes me that Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood give such fine performances when (for instance) one is required to uncork and pour wine for his guests during a major soliloquy and the other to dive and quake beneath a trolley just after Duncan’s murder.
It’s all gloriously inventive. Expect unsettling figures, including the blood-boltered Banquo, to emerge from the sinister industrial lift at the back. Expect a diabolic porter to welcome the entire Macduff family. Expect Macbeth’s feast to be seen twice, once through his eyes, one through his guests’.
It’s also all very political. There are Soviet-like uniforms and film of Soviet-style parades. Soviet agents topically poison Banquo on a train. Stewart even transmutes into a boorish, sadistically joking Stalin at that twice-staged feast. One weary thane has his fag snatched from his mouth and dismembered over his head. And poor obsequious Ross suffers some homophobic humiliation.
Ah yes, Ross. Here, he doesn’t just bustle about aiding the narrative, as Shakespeare wanted. As played by Tim Treloar, he’s an owlish nerd who sobs as he’s violently interrogated by a lord whose lines are actually friendly, then caught by Macbeth and his fellow assassins at Schloss Macduff. How he survives to join Malcolm in England is hard to understand, but Goold’s production is more notable for fitful brilliance than for consistency of approach or fidelity to the text’s demands.
Yet maybe we should blame Shakespeare, not Goold, if we can’t fully understand why Fleetwood, at first as splendidly fearsome a Lady Macbeth as I’ve seen, ends up washing her hands with bleach beneath a tap spouting blood. The hints of vulnerability in between can’t explain so huge a transition. As for Stewart, his key line is surely “to know my deed t’were best not know myself”.
Accordingly, we see this hesitant, stealthily ambitious man forced to become someone or something he can’t recognise as himself. It’s a remarkable performance: sucessively wry, watchful, grieving, angry, astonished, agonised, dangerous, exhausted, bitter, nihilistic. But the suggestion that he’s another Stalin is another example of over-clever direction. Stewart is a lot more interesting than that.
