Twilight's Last Gleaming
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Drawing on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Mary Lee Costa has created a play she hopes will be both in-key with contemporary politics, and accessible to its audience. Most of the verse has been transposed into American-accented prose, excepting The Witches’ Sabbath, in which Costa hopes to retain the original text’s alienating atmosphere of mystery.
How this is to be done remains mysterious in itself, given that both the Director and Producer intend to add a tonal undercurrent in the ‘comic’ direction, even in some of the play’s darkest scenes. The shifts in register, such as when Mac (Macbeth) addresses his wife in the oh-so-American way, “babe”, followed by “Dear wife, go home”, are perhaps out of joint with the business-like Whitehouse setting.
Schematic alterations to the plot promise to be interesting, conveying contemporary society's mistrust of governmental integrity. Duncan is stabbed with Malcolm's knife, for example, and Beth Glamis (Lady Macbeth) looks set to give a highly charged performance in which she eventually tries to restrain her husband from the very rampage she intends to send him on.
Credit must be given to Sarah Louise Tooke’s dedication despite losing a key actor as a result of a thesis-related crisis, and a specially composed score by Jonathon Higgs from the Royal Academy of Music adds a simplistic yet chilling piano accompaniment to the performance. However some directorial decisions are not so light and subtle of hand: Mac’s attempt to silence his coaxing wife by roaring, “The walls have ears!” seems somewhat out of touch with the script.
The audience might also find it hard to reconcile his uncannily familiar Texan-swagger with pangs of conscience, often making him, rather than Duncan, “pitiable as an abandoned baby.” This will certainly be a radical, even controversial, departure from Macbeth, but without a necessary injection of intensity, the proverbial hellbroth threatens to stagnate rather than bubble.
28th Apr 2005