Macbeth/Riders to the Sea review: Druid triumph with 50th anniversary double bill
★★★★★
As an Aran mother, to lose one son to the sea might be unfortunate, but to lose six? That's verging on farce itself, surely. And this is the trouble with Riders to the Sea. It's hard not to hear in Synge's woe-is-me lines something of the parodic performative misery of An Béal Bocht or similar spoofs. There's not a bit of that comedy on stage in this spare production, thankfully, but it's out there, an offstage echo of irreverence.
Still, Marie Mullen does well as old Maurya, allowing a certain modernity to peek out from behind her character's fatalism. As Druid marks 50 years, this feels like a necessary gesture to where the company is rooted, geographically and theatrically.
We see Mullen again a few minutes into the main event, the Scottish play, as Lady Macbeth. Marty Rea is in the lead role, and the age gap of this couple, the Macrons of Dunsinane if you will, creates a shifting power dynamic that director Garry Hynes exploits brilliantly throughout.
''Tis the eye of childhood,' Lady Macbeth says as she chides her husband's infirmity of purpose in their regicide. It's as if Marty Rea has latched onto that line, and indeed the play's obsession with eyes.
A scene from Macbeth, featuring Marty Rea and Marie Mullen. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
In the tiny Mick Lally Theatre, we are arranged like a retinue in an Anglo-Saxon hall, divided into rows by rude planks of wood above the dirt floor. It's intense and intimate, and Rea's eyes shine out at us. Darting and childlike indeed at first: bewildered at the witches' prophecy of greatness. Later, in his mania, they are fixed and burning. And, finally, empty. As Duncan puts it at one point, 'There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face.'
Clearly, Marty Rea has other ideas. He gives a superb refutation of that line. The tragedy of his Macbeth is this strange innocence he conveys, his initial unworldliness, his shaken 'single state of man'. All of it tending to make a mother of his wife.
It's Mullen's Lady Macbeth who wears the trousers alright, and vicariously wants that crown. Uneasy lies the head that will wear it? You bet. Especially since it's a crown of thorns, literally ripped from atop the same looming crucifix that overlooked Synge's world in the first half of this double-header. In Shakespeare's Scotland, Christianity feels more real, more integrated, compared with the patina over folk beliefs it seems for Synge's islanders.
Mullen's Lady Macbeth has a fierce zeal and a confidence won from maturity. In one scene, she barges loudly through a pair of doors, walking in a beeline, full of purpose and literally cutting short one of Macbeth's tortured soliloquies with the clatter. An inspired moment, in a production that brims with them.
But of course, it's Lady Macbeth's conviction that wanes, as she's reduced to a guilt-riddled sleepwalker. Macbeth's, meanwhile, grows in his unhinged mania. Rea struts and scrambles, spitting and stuttering on his Fs, as if always on the verge of an expletive, invoking Satan as he summons his servant. Flailing futilely against fate in a way Synge's Maurya would surely recognise.
A scene from Riders to the Sea, in Galway. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
The ultimate power couple are at the centre of Hynes's interest here, such that there's a notably easing of tension in scenes without them. But some breathing space is welcome across this long evening of theatre.
Amongst the excellent cast, Rory Nolan is Banquo, played with a level-headed maturity that contrasts nicely with Rea's Macbeth. Caitriona Ennis, Pattie Maguire, and Emmet Farrell are given great scope as the witches, their hands burning with eye-like wounds.
There are echoes of earlier Druid takes on Shakespeare here, certainly in Francis O'Connor's design. But there is an intensity and directness here that perhaps surpasses any of those. It's a production more than worthy of carrying the 50th-anniversary mantle. It transfers to the Gaiety in September, but really deserves to be seen on home turf, in the crucible of the Mick Lally Theatre.
Until July 26 in Galway. At Gaiety, Dublin, September 25-October 5
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