Katharine James
posted 14 June 2007

A night at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre is a quintessentially English experience. It is just charming. Leaving the busy city behind and turning into the park's Masonic sounding Inner Circle, a short path through the coiffured plant life soon finds the theatre perimeter. Through the gates is a little slice of wonderland with an outdoor restaurant and bar, fairy lights, trailing vines and a picnic lawn. Regent’s Park is now open for its 75th year of business and Ian Talbot's last as artistic director.

The first offering of the season is Macbeth, directed by Edward Kemp. The Scottish Play is very much down with the Zeitgeist – there's a flurry of productions at the moment: the Chichester Festival Theatre, the Pleasance in Islington and the Swan in Stratford to name but three. Kemp's is a reasonable effort with plenty of stage blood. Add in the location and accompanying atmosphere and it makes for an enjoyable evening's entertainment, but there is no strange magic or real terror. In his programme notes, Kemp gives some historical context to the play and asks, in light of this, several questions about the best way to treat it for a modern audience. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have decided on the answer, and the show lacks the sense of an overall vision.

The context is non-specific and the aesthetic uninspiring: overtones of modern warfare (bomb noises, army 4-wheel-drive, camouflage netting) are cobbled with medieval hag costumes for the witches and lilac trousers with tartan sash-belts for the warlike Scots. Straight on, side on and at a couple of rakish angles, the stage is flanked metal containers. These represent the action's shifting locations and provide platforms from which the witches mark the progress of their self-fulfilling prophecy. Amid rhododendrons and manicured privet hedges, they certainly don’t conjure images of war, but succeed instead in making the set look unfinished. Designer Jon Bausor should perhaps have looked to the space more carefully. Downstage, a muddy puddle lurks, sunk into the rubber flooring – a wash point for the frequently bloodied actors (and, on press night, a watering hole for a park pigeon at an inopportune moment…).

The acting is of mixed quality, but the energy and enthusiasm of the cast keep the momentum up and the audience engaged. The witches routinely seem to flummox directors of Macbeth. Here they have a moment of mystery in the second act when darkness has fallen and Kemp gives them some fire to play with; but they are otherwise badly costumed and a bit boring. Though 'Blue' Peter Duncan appears to be playing Macduffer rather than Macduff, the scene between his wife (Hattie Ladbury) and over-wise child (Oliver Coopersmith) is acted subtly and well. The general interpretation is fairly traditional, other than a number of misplaced gags which undercut key scenes: when Macbeth has given instruction to the murderers to kill Banquo, one of them tries to leave the stage with his crown: funny, but why? During the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth’s chastisement of her husband for killing the mood is played for a laugh, which it gets, again at the expense of the scene's tension.

The terror of this play is rooted in the isolation of the Macbeths in their complicity, and the markedly separate fracturing of their psyches. This needs two equal and extraordinary performances. Anthony Byrne’s Macbeth is strong, spirited and a good display of desperate abandon but his relationship with his wife is too ordinary, too domestic. Ordinary unfortunately also describes Sarah Woodward’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth. Despite having some of the most chilling verse in Shakespeare's back catalogue, Woodward has reduced her Lady to a pushy wife who fails to send any shivers down the spine.

Open air at 8pm is, in theory, good for Shakespearian tragedy. Plays begin with daylight and relative order and plummet into darkness accompanied chaos. But it will take a director with more force of vision than Kemp to produce a Macbeth here that'll make you sit up on your green gauze seat and think.

Till 16 August 2007