‘Macbeth’ Review: Daniel Craig, Ruth Negga Star in a Broadway Production That’s All Smoke
variety.comChristian Lewis A bare set. Actors making stew on stage. An abundance of hand-held fog machines. Vague contemporary setting and costumes.
A generally spooky atmosphere. Put all the ingredients together and you have director Sam Gold’s revival of “Macbeth.”It’s also the exact recipe for quite a few existing productions of “Macbeth.” It is in no way original to focus, as a curtain speech tells us here, on the witches and what we might call the generally creepy vibe of the play.
Under all the fog (and there is a lot of it), there isn’t much substance in this production, which clearly prioritizes an aesthetic and a mood over acting, coherence and Shakespeare’s text.The last show Gold (“Fun Home”) directed on Broadway, “King Lear” (starring Glenda Jackson), was an endless cacophony of confounding choices.
His “Macbeth” is better, but only marginally. This time he has a very clear, albeit simplistic directorial vision (spooky!), so the production has some focus, and he has cut the text down to two hours and 20 minutes, so things move fairly quickly.
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