By Matt Trueman
Imagine if you could bathe in Macbeth. Or cut it into lines and snort it. What about painting your house Macbeth? ‘OK,’ you’re probably thinking, ‘this time he’s actually lost it. What is he on about?’
What I’m trying to say is that Song of the Goat’s 75-minute Macbeth is about as non-natural—by which I mean ineffable, rather than anti-Stanislavskian—as any piece of theatre I’ve seen. The Polish company treats Shakespeare’s text not in terms of its mechanics and motivations, but as an orchestral score. Using Grotowskian techniques of rhythmic movement and Corsican chanting, they translate it into something uniquely theatrical, something that chimes rather than planting ideas. The result is the essence of Macbeth.
The words are treated sensorily. They carry meaning not through the concepts they signify, but on account of their tonal properties. Much of the text is chanted or sung chorally, sometimes delivered in layered whispers such that the words themselves become obscure and invisible. The same is true of the physicality. The eight performers hop and bounce around the
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Elsewhere, it is more earthy and visceral—achieved without any nod to viscera, actual or represented. Gabriel Gawin’s Macbeth is a grounded, solid presence, often oddly graceful in his masculinity, despite never making much of a villain out of the man. Banquo’s assassination, in which he is lashed around the stage by staffs, is stinging and invasive. He flops from one murderer to the next like a rag-doll in heavy winds or tumultuous waves, spinning and flailing. By the time Burnham Wood ups its sticks, the battle is a finely choreographed set of swishes and jumps that leaves you hanging on the edge of a breath. The various staffs come within a whisker of the tumbling performers, but never