Paul Anderson, review of Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican), Tribune, 10 April 1987
There are moments when Adrian Noble's Macbeth comes alive, but they are few and far between in a pedestrian production.
Noble has decided to interpret the play as the story of the psychological dislocation caused to Macbeth by the frustration of his desire to have children (and thereby form a dynasty). He shifts the centre of the play's gravity away from the initial regicide to the murder of Lady Macduff and her babes, and makes much of the cooling of passion between Mr and Mrs Macbeth.
I got the idea that the pair would never have got themselves into this awful mess if they'd concentrated on sex instead of getting ambitions beyond their station. Or perhaps they could have benefited from the services of a surrogate mother.
Jonathan Pryce plays Macbeth as a little man dominated by the voices in his head, a suitable case for treatment rather than a lucid human agent wrestling unsuccessfully with the moral implications of his actions. What Pryce does he does well, but it doesn't really seem to be Macbeth: to turn Macbeth's need for authority into a matter of individual psychosis might be very twentieth century, but it's hardly what Shakespeare intended.
Apart from Pryce, the cast is mostly unremarkable. Sinead Cusack's Lady Macbeth complements Pryce's Macbeth (which is hardly a compliment); the witches (Dilys Laye, Susan Porrett and Anna Patrick) are weird and unconvincing; and Peter Guiness's Macduff is adequate. The set is impressive and the staging well done (with the seige of Dunsinane particularly spectacular). But that's not really enough to detract from the production's basic failings.
