On Art, On Politics

It was a suffering kind of thing, as often is Macbeth. It’s not my favorite play and I think the theme is too often recycled elsewhere. Patrick Stewart, however, was phenomenal. It was hard to maintain my blase in the face of such a commanding actor. At any rate I did.

The play, as often is “Macbeth,” was re-contextualized with an potent collection of stage props. A steel desk and an 80’s modern television set were constant fixtures and during the first couple of scenes the director leans heavily on them. In those first moments of the play the steel desk becomes an ad hoc operating table which conveys all the mortal urgency of the modern war film. Also, the TV glows with pre-recorded black and white surveillance images of the actors on stage which is technologically common enough with stage props these days.

For instance, Tartuffe at the Macarthur in Princeton a couple of months ago split the attentions of audiences between monitors in a mostly bare room, and a partitioned stage left. The left stage, a bedroom which occupied no more than 1/3 of the whole stage, could be accessed only through a live video feed from a digital camera held by fourth-wall-straddling camera operator. It was a difficult kind of thing since most of the action is in the bedroom to which the audience has little access. The seated “security guard” in the corner of the bare room with the monitors (stage right) and the “crew member” who filmed the actors with the digital camera produced a pretty interesting effect–a pretty interesting stage despite all the walls.

Anyway, Macbeth was not so interesting or confusing. During the build to each dramatic crescendo, the TV would flicker as would the walls thanks to a Hi-Def projector over the audience. The effect was a sort of hyper-modern horror motif lifted directly from an Asian horror film. Unfortunately there was very little innovation apart from the pairing of the poor execution of Asian horror and a particularly exhausted Shakespearean play.

The space of the stage, white-tiled walls, was also fixed and for me this produced the overall ad hoc institutional quality of the play. As it does for Konami’s Silent Hill, so too is the rusty haunted institution motif something of a blank canvas for BAM’s Macbeth - a recontextualizable space where anything from dining to murder, and a combination of the two, is possible . In fact, in the spirit of new Asian macabre, the director has even figured the witches as three otherworldly military nurses which, interestingly, occupy the same spaces. Their transition from nurse to witch is marked by a change in lighting - which provides the opportunity for nurse and witch to bleed together. With a quick flip of the switch the stage dims, some creepy static crawls onto the monitor, and the institution-white wall tiles become a hellish wall paper, and suddenly it’s bubble bubble toil and all that jazz. The space, like the nurses, toggles between the sterile institutional and the other worldly. Inner spaces (or other kinds depending on your reading and cosmological preference) blend with outer spaces, I guess.

At one point, I believe it was act 4 when Mac Duff’s family is murdered, the director shoots for the popular filmic effect that I like to call in my layman’s tongue, the “shaky head” effect. It is so named for its appearance in the remake of House on Haunted Hill where in the apparition of the mad doctor of the asylum strolls up to a surveillance camera and his head gets all shaky. I love it. I could watch it for hours. I get really depressed when I think it’s gonna happen in a film and it just doesn’t. Anyhow, in act 4 the effect is attempted as the lights go on and off. Yet, I suppose it’s impossible outside of film so what happens instead is the lights go off and on to reveal different gory poses that are meant to shock but it all goes wrong because it turns interpretive dance-ish. The posing each time the lights returned suddenly embarrassed me–I don’t think that was the intended effect. It was hoaky.

At one point, what appeared to be actual footage from the American remake of the Japanese film, The Ring, in the form of a big luminescent ring, was projected on the wall amidst a trite bunch of white noise. There was a magnetic HUMMMM and some crackling and, officially, I was scared and felt suddenly compelled to leave the theater.

I’ve often considered the audience at BAM to be a pretty artsy and up-to-snuff crowd. My favorite part of going to BAM is the after-show eavesdropping, stealing a little bit of cultural capital from the artsy-fartsy super-smarties who often appear to be more in-the-know than their theater row counter parts. Yet, by the end of the performance, it seemed as though everyone had taken the bait.

A couple of years ago, this showcasing of what many are calling Japanese “soft nationalism” would have been profound, political even. At this point, submerging an over submerged Shakespeare play in some played-out commercial horror techniques, American-Japanese aesthetic currency, seems rather vacuous, thus gimmicky, thus obnoxious. Mr. Goold might have benefited from a study of Tartuffe at the Macarthur or looked to some deeper versions of film horror like Takashi Shimizu’s Marebito (2004). He at least could have abstained from projecting that borrowed footage on the wall. It was like that tired bullet dodging scene from The Matrix all of a sudden. 

 Am I missing something?

I can’t wait for Antony and Cleopatra in March.