Ralph Fiennes fights his way to power as Macbeth

Just getting to the near-sellout monstrous success Macbeth in Washington, DC, which has already been presented in Liverpool, London and Edinburgh, contains its own special adventure. Produced in the capital by the Shakespeare Theater Company, which has two venues in Washington, the show is actually mounted off-site, in a former television soundstage, essentially a cavernous concrete hangar in one of the city's industrial zones . (This may be why New York doesn't stop on the Macbeth tour, because the theatrical material isn't realistic enough.) Outside, spectators negotiate a warehouse wilderness and large-area car parks; inside, we spend time in a maze of luxurious dark, clubby rooms with velvety curtains. Finally, we walk to our seats, taking a path through a hyperrealistic no-mans land: rubble, the sound of distant bombs, and a staring soldier sitting in front of a burned-out car beneath a stunned, teetering street. light.

Even this single taste of immersion promises both sensation and intimacy. Director Simon Godwin (who is also artistic director of STC and associate director at the National Theater in London) answers the latter point: the purpose-built theater inside the forty-thousand-foot studio is in fact relatively small, so the play stars Ralph Fiennes. Macbeth and Indira Varma as his lady seem quite close. Both actors are equally familiar and present in associations of pure evil and political homicide respectively. Fiennes was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the Nazi Amon Gth in Schindler's List, and is feared by legions of moviegoers for his viper-faced Voldemort in the Harry Potter films; Varma played the scheming mother of the murderous sand snakes in Game of Thrones. Of course This groveling couple will team up to kill their overlord, King Duncan (Keith Fleming), at the vague prompting of three fortune-telling witches.

Modern military finery has become de rigeur when stars take on Shakespeare: Daniel Craig donned military fatigues for an Off Broadway production of Othello; Florence Pugh did the same, in a television adaptation of King Lear, as did Fiennes himself, in his own 2011 film of Coriolanus. This production, with costumes designed by Frankie Bradshaw, is no exception, but here , Fiennes, playing the An ambitious Scottish thane wants us to believe that he is unworthy of his combat boots. His obsequious and unmilitary physical appearance, particularly in the first hour and a half of the play, can be extreme: he sneaks and evades; he rotates his arms so that they swing like monkeys; he keeps his shoulders high and tucks his hips, seeming to move backwards even as he moves forward. In a company full of ramrod-straight spines, his convex slouch makes him look like the only guy who hasn't had basic training. (Maybe he had bone spurs?) Some of his intentionally strange performances are due to poor direction: Godwin allows Fiennes to occasionally mime his lines, to a sometimes ridiculous degree. When Macbeth, whose guilt makes him insomniac, laments the loss of sleep that ties up the collapsed sleeve of care, for example, Fiennes gently points to his own sleeve. At least he didn't mime sleep.

To misquote Shakespeare's bad play, there is method to much of this madness. Macbeth, Fienness' grass, is not an alpha, but he gets what he wants nonetheless. Nearly half a millennium after Shakespeare's death, we still recognize the pattern of absurd, unqualified leaders accepting the reins of power from the hands of sleepwalking aristocrats. In Washington, in an election year, thoughts on this subject form an additional drumbeat beneath the text. Godwin's contemporary interpretation seems to lean toward Russia: the doomed King Duncan wears fur on the collar of his royal greatcoat and when Duncan calls his bluff, Banquo (Steffan Rhodri) is able to reward the oily Macbeth for suppressing a rebellion, this immediately seems suspicious. East This how Duncan maintains power? Putin would favor weak men; perhaps, we think, Duncan does too.

Godwin's political reading is astute, but the magical elements of the play do not always seem to command his full attention. The witches who corrupt Macbeth's mind, wearing bleach-stained jumpsuits and mittens while lounging on the set's faux-concrete stairs, for example, look less like midnight witches and more like college students in art who are bored. Sound designer Christopher Shutt fills the air with eerie screams and Asaf Zohar compositions that weigh heavily on the spooky strings, but there's so much reliance on these atmospheric elements that they become overbearing. Macbeth Palace in Dunsinane is depicted as a refined, brutalist condolence complex, with gray staircases leading to frosted glass doors. It was also designed by Bradshaw and in a disappointing attempt at spectacle, a trickle of red-tinted water runs down its walls. What was probably envisioned as a blood tide simply looks like a problem of rising damp.

The performances Godwin gets from his actors are more daring. Varmas Lady Macbeth is brusque and goal-oriented, capable of prodding her sometimes reluctant spouse into action. She's not overtly malicious, but rather a true housewife hell-bent on getting chores done, killing a king, ordering a crown crossed off her checklist. (Varma's touch with language is exquisitely skillful; she lets us see the moment when her sluggish consciousness finally catches up with her all-too-efficient haste.) Godwin offers a banality of evil reading of the old bloody tragedy, which requires its leads . to shed much of their movie star majesty. When Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, she pointed out that the Nazi war criminal was truly incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. Her mind, she saw, had been soothed by small words that allowed her to excuse her own monstrosity. Macbeth, after meeting the witches in what is surely the most astonishing encounter of his life, says: “Whatever happens, time and hour crosses the hardest day. Boldly, Godwin and Fiennes interpret Shakespeare's aphorism as the kind of meaningless speech that lubricates a man's inner slide toward murder. Finally, when Fiennes reaches the banquet scene halfway through the play and we see his nervous attempts to play both the role of gracious host and confident king, all his strange and capricious anxiety at the Ed Grimley moves into position. Ah of course. Even after the four-star generals leave the cabinet, it's the insecure clowns who will kill us all.

After the intermission, the show gallops towards its end. The adaptation, by Emily Burns, cut a comic character and increased the number of defections from Macbeth's administration, and Fiennes, as if shocked by his character's loneliness, finally begins to deliver his speeches with simultaneous introspection and command . The climactic fights are fantastic, fought not with swords but with machetes, which echo in the smoky darkness. So it’s strange that what I remember from this hit series is a moment of silence.

One of the riddles of Macbeth's staging more difficult to solve than how the witch is dressed is Macduff's problem. Macduff (played here by Ben Turner) is one of Macbeth's equals, another thane, but one who places the interests of Scotland above his personal ambition. Shakespeare reveals his villainous protagonists late in the plot: Macduff only stands out from a diverse flock of Scottish lairds when Macbeth sends assassins after his family. Why should I This to be the man who will rule Macbeth on earth and not, say, one of Duncan's most wronged sons? To answer this question, Godwin finds a way to rebalance the room.

He does it entirely through timing. When, quite late in the drama, a man brings Macduff the news of the massacre of his wife and children, Shakespeare gives the traveler a strange and misleading message to convey: he first assures Macduff that his family is well, then slowly, an oblique phrase of oblique phrase, reveals that they are gone. Godwin asks Turner to remain still and silent, for what seems like minutes, while he takes in the information. He asks a clarifying question, then falls silent again. The ambient cello and the night owls fall silent, for once, and the rhythm finally rests. Turner is rooted to the spot. What, all my pretty hens and their mother/At once? Macduff stands like the stable foot of a compass, and the whole room must pivot around him. Macbeth, agitated and running away, does not realize it in Dunsinane, but his headlong flight towards power has been stopped, here, by an immobile man.