Patrick Stewart's "Macbeth" turn a likely smash

Macbeth

By Frank Scheck

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - It has traveled a long way -- from England's Chichester Festival Theatre, to the West End, to Brooklyn, to Broadway -- but the new production of "Macbeth," starring Patrick Stewart, has arrived with all its virtues intact.

Indeed, the production benefits immeasurably from its newly intimate confines, which only serve to accentuate its considerable intensity. As with previous Shakespearean outings on Broadway by major stars including Denzel Washington, business should be booming for this limited engagement, and a Tony nod for its star seems a distinct possibility.

Director Rupert Goold has provided a particularly visceral staging for this Expressionistic, modern-dress production, which takes place in a vaguely Stalinist-era Russia and which features a stark, industrial basement kitchen setting in which the characters' entrances and exits are made via an ominous large-sized elevator.

At times, there's an admittedly kitchen-sink aspect to the proceedings, with the director's often brilliant theatrical flourishes sometimes threatening to overwhelm the stark power of one of the Bard's most direct and accessible works. There's a self-indulgence on display at times -- one key scene, in which Macbeth violently reacts to the sudden presence of Banquo's bloody ghost -- actually is repeated: The first time, the apparition clearly is on display to the audience, while in its second rendition the vision is merely in Macbeth's guilt-ridden mind.

These occasional excesses do produce the not entirely beneficial result of stretching what's normally the shortest of Shakespeare's plays into a nearly three-hour marathon.

Particularly clever is the depiction of the always problematic three witches. Rather than the old hags that we normally encounter, they are presented here in various incarnations, most memorably in the opening scene in which they are shown as three nurses tending to the Bloody Sergeant in a military field hospital, their ministrations ultimately proving more homicidal than healing.

The production employs imaginative visual projections -- ranging from vintage films of marching armies to blood-soaked walls and heart-monitor flatlines when the proceedings turn violent. Startling lighting and sound effects add further to the already spooky atmosphere.