WE left the Abbey's production of Macbeth on Saturday night "pulsing with the power and tragedy of the masterpiece and we walked through a Dublin which has been transformed in recent" years into one of the great cities of Europe.
The much traduced area around O'Connell Street was full of amiable revellers, and we had an excellent post theatre dinner in a restaurant I haven't tried before the Talbot 101.
No capital in the EU could have provided a theatrical night out and a meal of such excellence for the relatively small amount of money it cost. Here was a theatrical production of one of the great plays of literature which had not been diminished in the least by the smallness of budget or of scale by our national theatre and then to dine in an excellent restaurant close by. As we left we marvelled at our good fortune in living in such a city at such a time.
All in the Balance
And all, all in the balance all we hold dear, all the prosperity which so many people have worked so hard to achieve, all the planning and the in vestment and confidence which our politicians and our entrepreneurs and our trade unionists may justly pride themselves in could within months count as nothing. We crossed a threshold on Friday night when the IRA attacked the blameless citizens of London's docklands and back over that threshold no passage is possible.
Macbeth is a wondrous play, so rich in language, so profound in message, that it is enriching at every level. This is a really fine production too, confirming that the Abbey is capable of presenting the greatest dramas of world theatre. Just about every aspect of the physical production of the play was just right Joe Vanek's single set, vast granite walls with huge gates served as boudoir, castle keep and blasted heath it is a truly magnificent staging sombre, overpowering yet dramatically tremendously versatile, allowing for narrative shifts without interruption. Joan O'Clery's costume designs were superb anachronistically inventive without being silly.
My colleague David Nowlan found Des McAleer's Macbeth lacking in the madness the part demands. But those who go mad and slay need not be barking in dementia their disorder can be cold and clinical, and involve great planning and enormous cunning. No outward symptom need betray the emergence of the psychopath. Years ago I used to visit Belfast UVF men in a club in Craven Street. Standing there, playing the fruit, machines and looking sturdily casual was Lenny Murphy, perhaps the greatest psychopath the troubles have thrown up. He did not froth, he did not twitch but I know now I saw him only hours alter he had slain.
Planning the Bomb
Did those who plant the bomb, did those who plan the bomb, snigger or twitch or froth? Those who become casual about human life do not become disordered in all their faculties they still love, as Macbeth still loved his lady, right to the end.
This quality Des McAleer retained throughout and he commanded the sinuous richness of the language with consummate skill and poetic sense. The language of Macbeth infuses the very language we speak today. Those who have never seen the play must sit entranced as phrases and expressions as familiar to them as family names come tripping from the stage. To provide such old familiars with power and intensity, retaining the intrinsic poetry yet still sustaining the dramatic obligations of the actor for after all, this is not a poetry reading is a vastly difficult job. At times Des McAleer was simply breathtakingly good his descent into homicidal idiocy was controlled and unnervingly real.
David Nowlan reported that Andrea Irvine's Lady Macbeth ended up more wimpish than demented there was nothing wimpish about her performance the night I saw Macbeth, which was not the opening night.
(Since I wrote unflattering remarks about an Abbey production some time ago, I was dropped from the opening night's guest list). I found her dementia real this was a woman more steeped in evil than her constitution could take. After all, does she not die of it, while her husband, initially a cats paw in her intrigue, thrives amid the blood?
Hired Killers
There is one aspect of Macbeth which troubles most audiences it is the abandonment by Macduff of his wife and children to go to England. The text is not clear on motive we may suppose that had he stayed he would have had the wit and presence to protect his family from Macbeth's hired killers.
What propelled him away from his family, to leave those he loved to those who hated him most? Was it the same melancholy sense of duty which repeatedly causes men to depart from those who are closest to them and to serve causes, ideologies, kingdoms or empires which do not even know their names? And in those causes die?
Those who brought their explosive and their ground icing sugar and whatever else goes into the confectionery of murder not long before Friday must have left their families to do something they perceive to be their duty. Such duties, if faithfully discharged in large enough numbers through all the sets of the antagonists, will in due and deadly course bring us to communal ruin on this island.
We have in the past already sampled that possible future, through the countless atrocities which disfigured Irish history over the past 25 years, prefigured to us all too well by Shakespeare.
Stands Scotland where it did? Alas poor country! Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother, but our grave where nothing But who knows nothing is once seen to smile where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air, Are made, not mark'd where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy the dead man's knell is there scarce ask'd for and good men's lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, Dying of ere they sicken.