The reluctant villain

The "Scottish Play", as it is fearfully known in theatre-speak, is in my opinion the Bard's most interesting play simply because there is no character in it who through his goodness redeems the otherwise doom-laden evil with which it abounds. Strangely enough it is only the main character himself, Macbeth, whom I am allowed to refer to as such as long as I do not mention him as the title of a play, who has some vague vestiges of decency and goodness.

Banquo's best hour is his sinister haunting while Lady Macbeth is by her own volition unsexed and full of dire cruelty.

Macduff leaves his wife and children to be slaughtered to fly to the Pretender Malcolm who is, as we find out, not a terribly engaging character either. The witches themselves are the hallmark of the play. Their equivocations, their evil deeds and, above all, their bizarre culinary habits are bloodcurdlingly ghoulish. As required they colour the entire play and all the action is by their inspiration. MADC's annual Shakespearean production, a tradition going back over 60 years, has been dislodged from its time-honoured venue at San Anton Gardens. Last year Midsummer Night's Dream was performed at the Opera House ruins. This year we were taken to Fort St Elmo where, betwixt and between high walls and battlements, in a place that has undoubtedly in its time seen real violence and cruel death, the bloody drama of the man who would be King of Scotland unfolded.

Directed by Geoffrey Borny, the production was uncomplicatedly orthodox and traditional; men in tights and all that, no innovations, no titillations, just plain honest-to-goodness acting in a play the language of which still languishes in our everyday speak in phrases like "one fell swoop" for instance or more amusingly in "knock, knock, who's there?". Shakespeare's prose is compressed and extremely complex as every nuance and turn of phrase exposes yet another diabolical equivocation that makes and unmakes the hapless villain in the title role. The only aspect of the production that was freshly innovative was the atmospheric percussion provided by Renzo Spiteri.

Paul Portelli is an unusual actor; one may say he is an acquired taste. His presence, tall, lanky and pale, lent itself visually to the portrayal of a rather sinister Macbeth. His voice, however, is low and husky, at times a trifle hoarse too with an intonation all of his own. Yes, one did have to prick up one's ears and pay attention to every word said. I was lucky enough to have sat in the front row, however, those further back did have some difficulty in catching on. The Macbeth jointly created by Mr Borny and Mr Portelli was that of a reluctant villain. Macbeth's evil ambition, his hubris, his bloodthirstiness were like borrowed cloaks which at times most disconcertingly were momentarily cast aside, enabling us to glimpse an ordinary decent man's soul in torment. I will not forget his "out out brief candle" or his "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" in a hurry.

Mr Portelli delivered his lines with a deliberate slowness that let each phrase breathe and allowed us to appreciate the splendour of Shakespeare's prose to the full. In fact, Mr Portelli's style was in stark contrast to the other tormented soul, Macduff, played with great strength and vehemence by Alan Paris. Where Mr Portelli was almost diffident, Mr Paris was brash. The scene in which Macduff is told that his wife and children have been slaughtered gave me gooseflesh. Incidentally, a revelation was the precociously good acting elicited by young Alexander Grogan as Macduff's young son.

Somewhere in between lies Banquo, the man who kept his counsel and paid the ultimate price for it; the man who suspected the worst and yet lingered on in Macbeth's shadow hoping and waiting that the witches' prediction would come true in his regard as well. Jean Pierre Agius played Banquo with a bland and cold inscrutability that convinced me that this "goodie" was no such thing. The silent malevolence of his stare had the effect of a cruciatus curse on Macbeth that was so powerful that I practically felt sorry for our hapless arch-villain.

But it is Lady Macbeth who is the epitome of evil. If anyone has ever experienced the operatic version of this play by Giuseppe Verdi, the two terrific arias by Lady M are transmogrified into something quite alarmingly dramatic that only a soprano with a voice that is what is called "cupa" that roughly translates into "dark and desolate" can pull off with full effect.

I always find it fascinating how Verdi transcribes the Bard so wonderfully. It is more than just the great music that is able to convey the raw passion so much more effectively than the Jacobean text, but Verdi was able to give Otello and the Scottish play an immediacy that transcends the original. In this case Charlotte Grech's Lady M was played with a level of passion that none of the other actors could reach. The sleepwalking scene wrenched at my heart despite the rather prosaic dialogue from the doctor and the lady in waiting that punctuated it. That cry of deep and primeval anguish was spine-chilling. She should have died thereafter.

It is the physical and mental anguish in the latter part of this powerful drama that plays on the audience's emotions; the consequence of having "murdered sleep".

Having reached the apex of their ambition Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, now king and queen of a gloomy and murderous Scotland, realise that the dictum of "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" is indeed true and they are sucked into a vortex of destruction until in the end what should have been impossible, Birnam Wood moving towards Dunsinane and that no man of woman born could harm him, became true, and there was that final awful realisation as Macbeth confronted Macduff, that naked recognition of irredeemable damnation that showed all over Mr Portelli's face as Mr Paris rushed at him for the last time.