Foul Is Fur! Open-Air Macbeth, with Giant Bunny

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.

Warning: Macbeth 2008 has practically nothing in common with Shakespeare’s Macbeth—save for the gruesome story. In that sense, it’s a new play.

Shakespeare cheerfully stole his story lines from other writers, of course. The primary source of his Macbeth is Holinshed’s Chronicles, while you could say the primary source of Mr. Jarzyna’s is Shakespeare.

MACBETH 2008 BEGINS in darkness at 9 p.m., and the darkness of monstrous sleepless nightmares is its apt signature. I’m unpersuaded by Stephen Greenblatt’s argument in the current New York Review of Books that productions of Macbeth ought to reveal the consoling possibility, suggested occasionally in the text, of redemptive light and hope—the better to appreciate the play’s descent into unredeemed evil. It’s like asking us to remember President Mugabe’s inner kindness.

No, the ruling note of any Macbeth must be hellish darkness through which light can never break. (“The night is long that never finds the day.”)

Mr. Jarzyna’s tragedy of diabolic evil and the intoxication of power is staged in the spectacular setting of a theater specially built in the ruins of Brooklyn’s roofless tobacco factory across the way from St. Ann’s Warehouse (which brought us the ambitious production). Supertitles are beamed on to two walls of the Macbeth 2008 set, and headphones provide a sensory soundscape of music and the actors’ voices, which only partially drowns the drone of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge close by.

It’s an unnerving, beautiful place to watch the drama unfold, and for Mr. Jarzyna’s purposes, the American flag flying proudly and coincidentally on the Bridge is part of the set. We watch the play from bleachers overlooking a two-story concrete building with various rooms. The opening scene establishes the grisly tone like a scene from a war movie:

A busy army command center is seen on the upper floor, while below Muslims appear to be praying in the shadows of a mosque. Major Macbeth—of the 1st Scottish Airborne, if you please—disobeys General Duncan’s orders to abort a dangerous mission and heroically attacks an unspecified target. (We assume it to be in Iraq.)

This is a Macbeth who will need little persuading from Mrs. Macbeth to become a butcher in order to advance up the ranks. He gleefully kills a Muslim we saw at prayer and hacks off his head.

Enter a veiled Hecate. The production has one witch, not three, and she’s a Muslim who’ll later reveal herself as a seductive, beautifully bald witch in a miniskirt.

Mr. Jarzyna’s choices can be a wee bit hit and miss. Is his Macbeth a Scotsman or an American? It isn’t clear; nor is the country we’re in. Is it Scotland or Iraq (or both)? If the narrative of Mr. Jarzyna’s Middle East Macbeth is mushy, his broad political message is clear. The coarse troops sometimes speak in American accents; an early, pro-forma orgy scene among them involves a female Elvis impersonator; the later pre-banquet scene has a sequined Uncle Sam as a master of ceremonies performing magic tricks (not very impressive ones, I must say).

The director has far better tricks up his sleeve. The simply staged banquet scene works brilliantly, like a possession scene out of The Exorcist. The ghost of butchered Banquo appears startlingly naked (except for his army boots). I’ve never before imagined a naked ghost, even in bad dreams. Such ghosts walk into gas chambers, wrote Milan Kundera, where “nudity is a shroud.” Next Page >