Photography by Adam Levy
It’s not often that I will voluntarily submit to Shakespeare – which must be something to do with it reminding me of school trips where me and my best mate Aisha would generally be raucous to annoy the middle aged audience and then wolf whistle through the applause. (well, she wolf whistled and I egged her on.)
So I don’t think I’ve seen Macbeth since I studied it for A-Level English. But I decided that attendance should be compulsory for a play that features not one but two random friends. I found out about this production through the miracle of communication that is Facebook, when Rob Wilson posted about his part as Macduff. And then I noticed a very familiar witch in the publicity shots. Louis Brooke! Whom I’ve known since he was a precocious 17 year old that I looked after on a children’s camp. He went off to Oxbridge and then decided he wanted to be an actor. Rob’s path I know less well but I’ve seen him around at festivals as part of Lost & Found for many years and gradually made his acquaintance.
So I thought it was high time I got me another dose of Shakespeare. As Rob opined, Catford is only 15 minutes from London Bridge on the train. Why not? I caught the train down one evening last week and trotted along to the local Broadway Theatre, where a gaggle of school children were also in to watch the play that evening. Amongst the audience members there was also my mate Thom, whom I know from Climate Camp. Turns out his dad runs the theatre. It is a small world indeed.
Macbeth begins with the famous witches, which for this adaption were played by three slippery boys – including Louis admirably togged up in torn basque and sporting a pearl earring. Throwing themselves around a spartan stage before falling on top of each other they were an engaging introduction to the production – which moved along at a cracking speed – and I enjoyed their thumping dance moves: the clumsiness a foil for their intuitive guile. Gareth Bale was expertly cast as Macbeth, but seemed not far from madness from the very get go, thereby making his descent into utter loon territory less vertiginous. Helen Miller’s Lady Macbeth was alluring enough to believe that dear hubby could never resist her scheming machinations, which were soon leading the terrible twosome into far deeper trouble than their vaunting ambition and guilty conscience could cope with.
I must confess that even now in my adult years I struggle with the language of Shakespeare, (possibly even more so than I did as a girl, when I was studying every last phrase). My concentration was not helped by the schoolgirls next to me, who started rustling papers and making notes to each other half way through. But the story really isn’t too difficult to follow and the cracking pace of scene changes snapped me back to the stage often enough. Louis reappeared several times as various ne’er do wells between reprising his role as a witch at intervals. During the later stages of the play Rob’s expressive face was perfectly suited to convey the sorry state of Macduff, who suffers the biggest bum deal of all. Of course the beauty of Shakespeare is that his stories are so timeless, and the political backstabbing and machinations of many centuries ago can just as easily be applied to the era of the Spanish Civil War, as here, or to today’s world.
This play was as enjoyable a rendition of Macbeth as any, and if you fancy a good dose of Shakespeare on a cold February evening you could do worse than make the trip down to Catford. Local it may be, but it was far from amateur. And if you live in South London, well, what are you waiting for – get down there and support your local theatre.
Macbeth at the Broadway Theatre runs until 20th February.
Tags:
Broadway Theatre, Catford, Macbeth, performance, Shakespeare, theatre
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