Review of the play “Macbeth” by Elizaveta Bondar at the Theater of Nations

On the Small Stage of the Theater of Nations, Elizaveta Bondar staged her version of “Macbeth” – gloomy and hopeless, where Shakespeare’s shell-shocked heroes speak the language of goblins. I tried to get to the meaning through the viscous text Marina Shimadina.

Elizaveta Bondar’s works are always distinguished by their darkness and at the same time an almost operatic precision of all details: each artist has his own voice and plastic score, far from realistic. In her production of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark at Novosibirsk’s Stary Dom Theatre, nominated for a Golden Mask in 2022, the characters moved like wind-up mechanical dolls with recorded speech. And in “The Power of Darkness” by Tolstoy, which the director released a year ago at the Almetyevsky Theater, all the characters seemed to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms: they were shaking with small tremors, their legs were moving apart, and their tongues were tangled.

“Macbeth” looks like a logical and stylistic continuation of that eerie story. Only here the action takes place not in a dying dense forest, but in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting (the artist Valida Kazhlaeva worked on the set design together with Bondar herself). In the middle of the stage rises a tree, entangling with its roots-wires the entire earth raised up by hummocks. In another situation it could be called the tree of life, but here it is clearly dead, like everything around it. Although, thanks to the work of lighting designer Igor Fomin, this lifeless landscape looks breathtakingly beautiful, and it can be considered as a valuable installation in itself, which also sounds amazing. Three composers worked on the production at once – Pyotr Aidu, Nikolai Popov and Oleg Makarov. And the musical instruments here are parts of the scenery found in landfills – iron sheets, metal pipes and rods, strings stretched deep in the back of the stage. In general, the feeling of the apocalypse is fully given to the audience already at the visual and sound level.

The setting of this “Macbeth” is a battlefield after the war, where ghost people, zombie people, shell-shocked, half-dead, roam. Moreover, the internal disintegration of personality is represented here physiologically, through defects in diction. Each of the characters has some kind of problem with pronunciation: one stutters, another chokes, the third growls and hums something. It’s quite painful to listen to, but that’s how it’s intended: at such a performance, the audience should feel discomfort, and not enjoy the high tragedy. By the way, the mystical tragedy here is also reduced to a farce. Instead of three prophetic witches promising power and glory, a wandering beggar woman (Sofya Evstigneeva), either crazy or a charlatan, appears to Macbeth. “After death, radiation leaves our body, mass remains, and the mass is decomposed into enzymes,” she says to begin with, setting the tone for the entire production. And only then he predicts Macbeth the rank of Thane of Cawdor and the Scottish throne.

True, murder in this world is so common and commonplace that for Macbeth, played by Lenkom Mark Zakharov artist Dmitry Giesbrecht, eliminating competitors does not seem to pose any particular problems. Yes, and Lady Macbeth, performed by Maria Smolnikova, although she pushes her husband to crimes, reproaching him for cowardice, but all her attention is drawn to the empty cradle, which she carries with her everywhere. And in the crying intonation of the actress’s speech, female-gynecological vocabulary dominates: uterus, womb, womb, abortion, and so on. So the heroine seems crazy from the very beginning, she is tormented not by the desire for power, but by the desire for revenge on this world that took away the happiness of motherhood from her.

But Shakespeare’s text suffered the most in the production. The play, written by Anna Lifirenko, seems to juxtapose several translations of Shakespeare – from poetic prose to verse reduced to speech. But part of the text was rewritten as if in the language of goblins. This speech, suffering from inversions and neologisms, seems to be decomposing, mutating along with everything else. Crippled by the war, people who have lost their minds can no longer speak in the high Shakespearean style. They spit out mangled words that are not so easy to identify: “I’m going wild” instead of “I repent,” “puke” instead of “choose,” “reverence” instead of “thank you,” and so on. Some monologues in this language are simply impossible to understand, so the audience loses the thread of the story.

But political slogans immediately catch your ear: “our duty to Scotland is to be at one with the Tsar,” “the Tsar knows best,” “we must wait a little.” This is how Macbeth’s associates reason until they themselves have to flee to England from persecution. But even the fair and child-loving Macduff (Alexander Grishin), who speaks most of all about the rights and freedoms trampled by the tyrant and leads the campaign against Macbeth, turns out to be compromised. The same vagabond witch in the finale predicts the throne for him – and it becomes clear that this bloody vicious circle of violence and struggle for power will never stop. Even if Birnam Forest moves onto Dunsinane Hill, as the prophecy promised.