REVIEWS

THEATER BEAT

A bubbling caldron of mayhem in 'Macbett'

Revising a play that is already revisionist is a tricky proposition.  But director Neno Pervan boldly dickers with Eugene Ionesco's "Macbett" in Il Dolce Theater Company's gratifyingly revisionist staging at the Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood.

An absurdist take on Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Ionesco's lengthy 1972 play is remarkably faithful to the dramatic arc of its source material. So too is Pervan's drastically abbreviated version, taken from Charles Marowitz's translation and presented here by special permission of Ionesco's daughter.

Pervan's production is Cliffs Notes brief yet in keeping with Ionesco's absurdist spirit. What results is surprisingly perspicacious Shakespeare, albeit with a few soap-opera embellishments, most notably Ionesco's innovative subplot in which Duncan's disgruntled wife has a steamy affair with Macbett, urges him on to regicide and subsequently marries him.

A nimble cast, including Pervan himself, keeps the action clean and streamlined. Hilariously cowardly and self-serving, Pervan's Duncan is a preening dandy of suitably ridiculous ilk. As Macbett, glowering Zoran Radanovich hits the right emotional levels but needs to scale back his leaping, occasionally unmotivated aerobics. In the most full-fledged performance of the evening, Pamela Clay plays Lady Duncan/Lady Macbett as a saucy siren on the downhill slope to lunacy and despair.

Now for a quibble. For some odd reason, Pervan blocks numerous scenes on the stage floor, beneath the sightlines of a majority of the audience, which strains and cranes to see glimpses of the prostrate actors. Surely, a few suitably placed platforms could have raised this production, not to mention its performers, to new heights.

- F. Kathleen Foley

History of Macbett

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MACBETT
by Steven Mikulan

One of the great unsung discoveries in the economy of theater was Ionesco's epiphany about Macbeth: Why use three witches when two will do? His 1972 re-imagining of Shakespeare's tragedy, called Macbett, not only makes do with a pair of weird sisters, but combines the role of the bloody thane's wife with a new character - Lady Duncan - and limits most of the story of Macbett's vaulting ambition to his assassination of the king. Shakespeare, of course, took us far beyond this act of murder and treason, but Ionesco is obsessed mostly with the regicide, while portraying the principals involved as boorish schemers. This makes for a rollicking yet, paradoxically, thoughtful exploration of the Scottish tragedy, extending the metaphor of fatal visions into the realm of everyday life.

Director Neno Pervan, using Charles Marowitz's translation, creates a kind of Rocky Horror Show production, in which snatches of Shakespeare joust with Alfred Jarry: Duncan (Pervan) struts about in a shiny, lime-colored Teddy Boy suit, Lady Duncan (Pamela Clay) jumps onto the throne whenever her husband is absent, and Macbett (Zoran Radanovich) emerges as a Dracula cousin. The result is a well-acted reinterpretation of Shakespeare that respects the Bard while it mocks his solemnity, and makes this darkest of his plays accessible even to people who have never seen it performed. (On opening night a woman sitting behind me complained that the program notes didn't provide a "synopsis," and the house burst into applause at the end of Macbett's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy - thinking, when some candles were blown out, that the show was over.)

 I've always thought you can judge a Macbeth by the way it brings Birnan wood to Dunsinane, but Pervan doesn't bother with so much as handing out a few twigs among his actors, which, in a way, is the most beautifully absurd aspect of his production.

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Doomed Couples
Scottish malice, Sicilian malaise
by Steven Mikulan

You know theater has entered its Halloween season when Macbett, Eugene Ionesco’s late-career take on the Scottish play, opens in black light with a horror-movie score, and as Shakespeare’s Highland hellhound is wordlessly welcomed into existence by only two weird sisters who have emerged from a trapdoor. This eerie prologue, in which Macbett, lifelessly seated on a throne, appears more like the dead Christ in a Deposition painting than the vigorous Thane of Glamis, suggests the territory we’re to cover tonight — Dark Ages realpolitik dampened by the mists of magic and superstition.

Ionesco’s 1972 play is rarely produced professionally (UCLA mounted a technologically elaborate version three years ago) and is not considered one of his more important works. Still, Il Dolce Theater Company and Spirit of Sarajevo are to be complimented for staging this effort at the Globe Playhouse. Director Neno Pervan, editing down Charles Marowitz’s translation of the original French, explores the comedy and pretense Ionesco found in Shakespeare’s solemn characters, while sometimes reverently quoting from the Bard’s original text. In this story, both Macbett (Zoran Radanovich) and his comrade in arms, Banco (Julius Noflin), are made mad with visions of power upon hearing the witches’ prophecies. In fact, everyone involved is either after power or buffoonishly trying to hold on to it. King Duncan (Pervan), seen here as a cowardly bully dressed in a shiny, lime-green Teddy Boy outfit (or is it a zoot suit?), is an obnoxious boor who’s constantly shoving the queen off his throne.

Which leads us to one of Ionesco’s additions to the script -— Lady Duncan (Pamela Clay). She is a cunning, conniving bitch who marries Glamis to become Lady Macbett. Our potential confusion doesn’t matter since the two women meld into the same malignant spirit goading Macbett to murder his benefactor and, later, Banco. To Ionesco, Macbett’s murder of his king overshadows everything; Lady M’s death, Birnan wood, the concluding swordplay are all afterthoughts to the regicidal theme.

In Macbeth’s brutality, we can discern a cleaving apart of Shakespeare’s more enlightened world, as though in the fossil record of pre-Norman Britain stirs a dream of government that serves a common good, as opposed to mere blood sport. This notion runs elsewhere in popular cultures — Eisenstein’s film Aleksandr Nevsky opens on a brooding landscape whose inhabitants seem nearly primordial, yet ends with Nevsky’s appeal to justice and progress. However, in Macbett, the Romanian-born Ionesco, looking back in time past the refinement of constitutions and parliaments, is fascinated with the primitive urges that still lie at the heart of virtually all modern conflicts. Pervan, attuned to this, presents a kingdom uneasily lit with flickering candles and governed by a belief in witches. In a sense, he combines Macbeth with Ceausescu, and Scotland with Transylvania, drawing out of the mad forest of European villainy a narcotic faith in selfish violence.

These themes have a track record: Ron Magid’s pulpily political history Dracula Tyrannus played at this same venue in 1988, and indeed when in Bram Stoker’s Dracula the Count dismisses modern Continental treaties as "these days of dishonorable peace," he may well be looking nostalgically at Macbeth’s Scotland and Nevsky’s bloodied Russia. The Globe, with its two-tiered set, balcony and Tudor windows, lends itself to demagogic nightmares. None of this is to suggest that Macbett is a gruesome meditation on power politics — if anything, it’s more of a Rocky Horror Show meets Ubu Roi, complete with Ionescoan touches: A grizzled man (Alexander Veadov) sells lemonade from his wheelchair, a little boy (Andrej Pervan) with a butterfly net searches for Macbett. And, for pure nuttiness, Duncan is murdered on Animal Healing Day, an annual holiday on which the king cures the local livestock and pets of their ailments. (A significant change from Ionesco’s original scene.)

Director Pervan gets some good performances from his cast, notably Radanovich and Clay, and his production benefits from Slavko Pervan’s spartan set that, nevertheless, places a guillotine behind Duncan’s chair (talk about your throne of blood), while Mladen Milicevic’s cheesy synth-goth score recalls Euro-horror films of the 1970s. In the end, this is a story about a man who murders another for his coat and crown, while forgetting the woman who made his ascent possible. After Macbett meets death, his corpse is carried and caressed by women to the throne with its awaiting blade — perhaps that is the absurdest touch of all.

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