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<\/p>\n\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tEwan Donald as Malcolm in <\/span><\/span><\/em>Dunsinane.<\/span><\/span> Photo by Jason Ma.<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n \n\tIs it just me or has the theatrical culture of the English-speaking world gone into a terminal decline? I would think that perception a sign of my advancing age but for the occasional straws in the wind to suggest that I am not entirely alone.\u00a0Janice Turner in\u00a0The Times<\/em>\u00a0of London<\/a>, for example, writes that she recently walked out of Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s movie\u00a0Inherent Vice<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAfter 30 minutes of letting bonged-out hippy ramblings \u201cwash over\u201d me, I was imploring my husband to leave. We lasted an hour. And as we burst into the foyer, enjoying that same exquisite pleasure as when escaping a boring dinner or almost any play, two others followed us. \u201cWhat the hell was that about?\u201d we all cried.<\/p>\n \n\tCan you guess what words in that passage leap out at me? I\u2019ll tell you. \u201cAlmost any play.\u201d Yes! I can barely remember the last play that I didn\u2019t at least\u00a0want\u00a0<\/em>to walk out of at intermission. And I have now walked out of the last two I have seen at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. A few nights ago it was\u00a0Dunsinane\u00a0<\/em>by David Greig, presented by the National Theatre of Scotland. To be sure, my dissatisfaction wasn\u2019t entirely the fault of the play, which wasn\u2019t quite so bad as I had expected\u2014not that that is saying very much for it. It was pretty bad, at least what I could hear of it. A combination of the uncompromising Scottish accents (why is making the actors speak comprehensibly to American ears the only bit of pandering to the audience\u2019s ignorance that the producers won\u2019t do?) and poor enunciation and acoustics meant that I found only about half of the play understandable.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd what I could understand made precious little sense of any but the most literal kind. The big idea of Mr. Greig\u2019s play, in case you don\u2019t know, is to bill itself as a sequel to\u00a0Macbeth<\/em>, with the occupying English army in Scotland of the 11th<\/sup>\u00a0century seen as analogous to the Americans and British in Iraq or Afghanistan in the 21st<\/sup>. Shakespeare, as is usual these days in the theatre company that bears his name along with that of the Father of Our Country, is nothing but a convenient peg on which to hang contemporary and remarkably facile political commentary of a predictably left-wing sort\u2014which is thus meant to take on a certain lustre from its association with his brand-name drama.<\/p>\n \n\tYet the analogy itself is a potentially interesting one. The historian Niall Ferguson\u00a0made it in connection with last year\u2019s Scottish independence referendum<\/a>. Writing of a period half a millennium after that in which the play is set, he pointed out that,<\/p>\n \n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tfor most of the early modern period, the Scots kingdom was Europe\u2019s Afghanistan. In the Highlands and the Hebrides, feudal warlords ruled over an utterly impoverished populace in conditions of lawlessness and internecine clan conflict. In the Lowlands, religious zealots who fantasised about a Calvinist theocracy \u2014 government by the godly Elect \u2014 prohibited dancing, drinking and drama. John Knox and his ilk were the Taliban of the Reformation. Witches were burnt in large numbers in Scotland, not in England.<\/p>\n \n\tYet this intriguing comparison, and anything it might have had to teach us about what we and the world are up against in the war on Islamic terrorism, conveys nothing to the playwright or the players or the Shakespeare Theatre audience apart from the smug self-satisfaction of knowing that\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0would have been smarter than to get involved in some other country\u2019s civil war.<\/p>\n \n\tMind you, we\u2019re talking here about something very much better than the worst of the politicized theatre (or movies) spawned by the wars of the last decade. Siward, the English general played by Darrell D\u2019Silva, is much more sympathetically portrayed than might have been expected: a good man with the best of motives in overthrowing the tyrant Macbeth. He tries to do his best for the subject Scots, but he is in way over his head and subject to continual manipulation by the duplicitous Malcolm (Ewan Donald), his own corrupt lieutanant Egham (Alex Mann) and the beautiful but ruthless and treacherous Lady Macbeth\u2014here called Gruach and played by Siobhan Redmond, who created the role in 2010\u2014imagined as having survived her husband\u2019s defeat to treat with Malcolm and the English as a rival power center among the feuding Highland warlords. Siward\u2019s good intentions are to the play\u2019s credit, but they are made to seem hopelessly naive and turn him into nothing more worthy of our respect than the fools he is being compared to.<\/p>\n \n\tBut what propelled me out the door at the first opportunity wasn\u2019t even that there was exactly zero effort to imagine what people of a thousand years ago would have looked or thought or talked like\u2014assuming they could speak comprehensible contemporary English. Like the fights, which were all stylized and made no pretense of realism, the characters were not even supposed to look like the world they were ostensibly representing. But no, what bothered me about seeing my contemporaries pretending so unconvincingly to be people of the Middle Ages is that they seemed to have been doing it as a positive reproof to the audience\u2019s now very much latent desire to see something other than themselves reflected back at them. \u201cDon\u2019t go there!\u201d Mr. Greig\u2019s puppets appear to me to be saying. \u201cYou won\u2019t find anything in the vast graveyard of the past to compare in interest to the mugs you already know all too well and whom we are once again putting on stage for you to feel superior to.\u201d Maybe, unlike them, I\u2019m just tired of feeling superior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1248,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","wds_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472],"tags":[],"dispatch-city":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fb0bff29d65","label":"Participants","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"object","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651c536113a8e","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"No","value_formatted":false,"value":0,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66009169342f2","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":0,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}}},"author_meta":{"display_name":"James Bowman","author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/james-bowman\/"},"featured_img":null,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Dispatch<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Dispatch<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 9 years ago","modified":"Updated 11 months ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on February 27, 2015","modified":"Updated on June 13, 2023"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on February 27, 2015 12:34 pm","modified":"Updated on June 13, 2023 3:20 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["author_meta","featured_img","jetpack_sharing_enabled","jetpack_featured_media_url","coauthors","tax_additional","comment_count","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111674"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111675,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111674\/revisions\/111675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111674"},{"taxonomy":"dispatch-city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dispatch-city?post=111674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}