PuSh 2017: Macbeth

For me, one of the most anticipated shows at this year's PuSh Festival was Macbeth, a radical re-interpretation of Verdi's opera of Shakespeare's Scottish play from South Africa's Third World Bunfight. A co-presentation with the Vancouver Opera and the Italian Cultural Centre, director and designer Brett Bailey has set his adaptation of the story of the original House of Cards couple in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with Verdi's score having likewise been radically reworked for just 12 on-stage musicians by the Belgian composer Fabrizio Cassol. Given the DRC's colonial history, I couldn't help commenting on the irony of Cassol's nationality to Richard, although that's not the only transnational jolt of surprise/confusion one receives from this production.

Bailey's Macbeth is not the first work for the stage to set a well-known Western dramatic classic in the DRC. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined is a loose version of Brecht's Mother Courage that uses the history of the populous Central African country to comment on the ravages of war--particularly, in the case of Nottage, for women. Both Bailey and Nottage see in the DRC's ongoing civil wars, which have been fuelled by the country's rich mineral deposits, extra-territorial commercial interests, the bitter legacy of colonialism, and state corruption and poor infrastructure, an allegory of ambition, greed and personal betrayal. In Bailey's case, his Macbeth (a terrific Owen Metsileng) is initially just a soldier trying to do his job; however, when he and his buddy Banquo (the commanding baritone Otto Maidi) come across three witches in the jungle who prophesy Macbeth's ascent to power, the wheels of fate begin to turn. It's one of Bailey's savvy innovations to have the "witches" in this version of the story coerced into telling what they know about Macbeth by an armed captor, at once suggesting that this is all being manipulated by outside agents attached to the multinational mining corporation Hexagon about which we hear later and pointing to the fact that kidnapping and sexual enslavement, alongside rape and genital mutilation, have been some of the most grievous (and internationally ignored) consequences of the decades-long ethnic conflict in the DRC.

Bailey also hits a high note, quite literally, with his casting of the magnificent mezzo-soprano Nobulumko Mngxekeza as Lady Macbeth. With her red gloves and pumps, her skin-tight leopard-print dresses, her righteous indignation, and her cajoling of her husband to "be a man" and get on with killing General Duncan, she is a fearsome version of Taraji Henson's Cookie Lyon, from TV's Empire (another Shakespeare adaptation). The lower range of Mngxekeza's voice is especially captivating; it insinuates its way into your own body and the shiver that accompanies it viscerally telegraphs that this is not a woman to be crossed. At the same time, Mngxekeza displays amazing vulnerability during her aria about the blood that nevertheless remains on her hands. Watching and hearing all of this in the intimate setting of the Vancouver Playhouse was an added treat.

There is so much else to admire about this production, including the virtuosic playing by members of the VO Orchestra, and especially the genius conducting by Premil Petrovic, who has been with the production since its premiere in Cape Town in 2014. Bailey's staging also moves fluidly, in its physical score, between scenes of simple Broadway-style choreography, overt pantomime, and a heartbreaking dumb show of grief to accompany the description of the massacre of Macduff's family and village that doubles as an after-image of too many real-life scenes from the DRC, and the continent of Africa as whole. Finally, there are the photographic, text-based, video and animated projections by Roger Williams. Most of these illustrate and supplement the performance in an integral way (for example, the bits of text that fill in parts of Shakespeare's story that have had to be compressed, or that provide additional context for the transposition of that story to the DRC); however, half a dozen of the slides relate to an additional narrative frame that Bailey has appended to his staging that left me a bit mystified.

I refer to the fact that we are told at the outset that the performers on stage are part of a company from the DRC that inherited the found story we are about to hear and that, subsequently, we get illustrated slides filling us in on the fictitious stories of their displacement, orphaning, conscription as child soldiers, and so on. I question the need for such theatrical subterfuge. Why present a South African cast as playing Congolese refugees playing transposed members of warring Scottish clans? Does that somehow make the story more authentic? Or does it assuage certain directorial anxieties about a white South African having the right to tell a story about the DRC in the first place? At the very least, the decision struck me as potentially (and I'm assuming unintentionally) reinforcing two problematic thoughts in the largely Western audiences to which the piece has toured: that all black performers are interchangeable; and that this is the story not just of the DRC, but of all of Africa.

P

A West Coast Macbeth

Sexy and conceptually innovative restagings of The Scottish Play seem to be all the rage these days. Sleep No More, Punchdrunk's immersive, film noir-style take, in which audience members follow different characters from room to room, is into its second year at a New York hotel. The National Theatre of Scotland did a one-man version of the play on Broadway last year starring Alan Cumming. And on through this Sunday at the Russian Hall on Campbell Street in Strathcona is To Wear a Heart So White, Leaky Heaven Circus' re-imagining of the text for our Coast Salish West Coast that is equal parts historical, liturgical, and scatological.

In the Shakespearean canon one thinks of The Tempest as the "postcolonial play"--as, indeed, it has been taken up in countless rewritings, including Aimé Césaire's classic Une Tempête. However Leaky Heaven director Steven Hill and his creative collaborators take as their starting point for this piece the fact that shortly after "discovering" our fair shores, Captain George Vancouver (along with Captain James Cook and others, one of several white colonial "ancestors" to whom we are invited to pay homage at the top of the show) and his crew staged as a little diverting theatrical entertainment for Indigenous locals a version of--you guessed it--Macbeth. Using Shakespeare in this way to reconfigure the colonial project not as a Prospero-like act of magic (e.g., the depopulating rhetorical sleight-of-hand that comes with declaring an inhabited region terra nullius) but as a calculated power grab and incredibly bloody conquest is a bold and fascinating move. As is the suggestion that the violence continues in and through Shakespeare's historical and contemporary (re)productions--from the various audio and video excerpts from past Macbeths to which the Leaky Heaven actors attempt to synch their performances to that species of local theatrical colonization that unfolds every summer in Vanier Park.

Plot-wise, To Wear a Heart So White condenses the action to the three characters of Macbeth (Alex Ferguson), Lady Macbeth (Lois Anderson), and Banquo (Sean Marshall, Jr.). And, taking a cue from Roman Polanski, the creative team does not stint on the gore. At the climactic banquet scene (generously laid to involve a portion of the audience), Banquo, oozing blood from the knife stuck in his back, serves a pig's head to the newly crowned king and queen, whom we see (via outsized pantomimed gestures) and hear (courtesy of Nancy Tam's brilliant sound design) gulping their wine and slurping their food with lustful abandon.

The play concludes with Ferguson's Macbeth accepting a bear's head from Marshall's Banquo, and being coaxed by Anderson's Lady Macbeth into taking to the proscenium stage with it (where several of the scenes, along with Parjad Sharifi's amazing projections, take place). Once on stage, Ferguson recites Macbeth's famous concluding soliloquy ("Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."). Following a brief blackout, Marshall emerges with a step-ladder and squeegee, and as he appears to wipe down the condensation from the inside of the rain-swept windshield we see projected on the screen, Ferguson reappears from the stage's back safety door in full British naval regalia. A perfect synecdochic image linking our colonial past to our neoliberal present.

P.