Reviews

Dunsinane

“You: be a tree,” commands the sergeant as David Greig’s outstanding new play for the RSC, opening a short residency at Hampstead Theatre, overlaps with its mother drama, Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It’s not in the same class as Malcolm’s “Let every soldier hew him down a bough and bear’t before him,” but as well as writing the best modern companion play to the Bard since Edward Bond’s Lear, Greig is partly entering a Monty Python mode of historical nose-thumbing.

The castle at Dunsinane is stormed, the tyrant’s head stuck on a pike and his widow – she has not “as ’tis thought” jumped off the castle walls – mourns the remaining corpse of a man who ruled for fifteen years; this loss is paralleled with that of the play’s hero, Siward, the Earl of Northumberland, whose son, here called Osborne (not Young Siward) is slain in the attack.

Siward (a hirsute, troubled, foggy-voiced Jonny Phillips) has the task of quelling the insurgency after King Malcolm’s (Brian Ferguson) crowning at Scone. Not only is Lady M still alive, she’s a defiant witch called Gruach in Siobhan Redmond’s compelling performance, and she has a son by her first husband (whom Macbeth killed) which complicates matters even further: he must be hunted down. Even then, there’s a grandchild…

Roxana Silbert’s exciting production, sign-posted in letters home to his mother from a rookie English soldier (affectingly done by Sam Swann) unravels on a thrust promontory representing Scotland itself in Robert Innes Hopkins’ design, backed by a rising terrace of steps and a medieval stone cross in a re-configured auditorium with the audience on three sides.

This allows for a renewed epic quality in Greig’s writing, as the Scottish nobles continue their war in pursuit of peace, Malcolm wallows in venality, the English soldiers go on the march like football hooligans and Siward and Gruach – who have dallied sexually before she makes a treacherous “wedding of convenience” with Malcolm – are precariously united in a melodramatic snowfall in a remote holy place.

Greig cleverly echoes the “England” scene in Shakespeare, and theLear-like violent elements in Bond with a taunted hen girl (Lisa Hogg), while elaborating on the habitual animosity between our two nations, the weather, and the irritating national clannishness in Ewan Stewart’s boring-as-haggis Macduff, delineating the territories with his long staff and relishing the endless fall-out from a war that can never be won.