Riders to the Sea and Macbeth double bill
Mick Lally Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival
★★★★★
It seems unorthodox at a crucial moment in Macbeth that an assassin prowling a castle would choose to speak aloud – not to a person, but to the ground beneath his feet: “Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps.” It’s a line that speaks to Druid who again, after DruidSynge and DruidShakespeare, fill their stage with topsoil: a withered terrain to be exploited for conspiracy.
As paranoia grows in Garry Hynes’s extraordinarily accomplished production, we similarly find ourselves unsettled, sorting through a series of prophecies inherited not from Shakespeare’s witches but by John Millington Synge. The double-bill opens with Riders to the Sea, Synge’s island-tragedy about a household fearing the demise of their seafaring brothers. The dismissive Bartley, played with arms-folded arrogance by Marty Rea, refuses to heed the storm warnings of a mother more knowingly otherworldly than real (in other words: Marie Mullen).
That deafness isn’t the only callback when moving into Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, where reports of a world-flattening storm recall Synge’s “great roaring in the west”; the breadmaking ritual of movement director David Bolger becomes witchcraft; and a woman’s death cry reverberates as an echo of Aran keeners. Bartley’s negligence is an obvious mirror for Shakespeare’s ascendant tyrant. A more tantalising comparison may be the watery mass grave observed by Mullen’s mother, claiming the “power of young men floating round in the sea”. This is Macbeth twisted out of human resemblance: a force of nature.
Not long after Rea’s Macbeth first allows a smile to fall out of his battle-serious face, uplifted by a prophecy of power, he’s already second-guessing a murder plot against the king. “Leave it all to me,” says Lady Macbeth, made frighteningly ambitious and focused by Mullen, and who holds out a dagger for her husband to grip in his mouth like a dog. Remarkably, he seems to be her bitch.
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Together, they perform a riveting cycle of agonised doubt and needy consolation. But even Lady Macbeth becomes horrified by the hellhound she’s helped create, and whose obsession stretches beyond where they can enjoy their triumph.
Rae’s is a Macbeth – increasingly wild-eyed, crawling on all-fours, with strangely drawn-out line-deliveries – whose interpretation of divine rule is to pluck his crown from atop a Crucifixion statue. That isn’t the extent of the production’s perversion. A scene where he slaughters his rival’s family is also an attack on Riders to the Sea, ripping apart that play’s sacred life-sustaining bread and family heirlooms. (Hynes’s marathon productions have arranged plays in thrilling sequences. She’s never cannibalised one of them before!).
A line can be drawn between such brutality – made possible by lighting designer Colin Grenfell’s miraculously etched shadows and the surprise entrances of Francis O’Connor’s set (drawing on the dynamism of Shakespeare’s Globe) – and the instant gore of a crimson-bloodied Mick Lally stepping out as a skull-cracked survivor in the company’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1982. After all that time little feels sanctified. Unlike Macbeth, Druid’s ambition seems too great to freeze in easy prophecy.
Druid’s double bill of Riders to the Sea and Macbeth runs at the Mick Lally Theatre until Saturday, July 26th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival; all performances are sold out. Macbeth moves to the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from September 25th until October 5th
