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Two Paris playhouses, each alike in dignity, placing on rival new Shakespeare productions.
Thus expectations have been excessive for a springtime face-off — with modern stagings of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” — between the Comédie-Française, France’s prime everlasting firm, and the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the Left Financial institution’s most venerable theater.
The outcomes definitely felt French. The nation has lengthy been a haven for concept-driven theater-makers, and the 2 administrators concerned, Silvia Costa and Christiane Jatahy, haven’t any qualms about reducing and splicing the Bard’s performs in experimental, typically cryptic methods.
On the Comédie-Française, Costa’s “Macbeth” edits the 2 dozen named characters all the way down to solely eight actors and leans closely into non secular symbolism. In “Hamlet,” Jatahy goes as far as to maintain Ophelia alive. Removed from going mad, Ophelia climbs down from the stage and exits by means of the auditorium after declaring: “I died all these years. This yr, I gained’t die.”
Jatahy, a Brazilian director who has a big following in France, has carried out this form of bait-and-switch with classics earlier than. Her variations of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (“What If They Went to Moscow?”) and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (“Julia”) reworked the performs’ story strains and characters from a feminist perspective, lending larger weight to feminine roles.
On the Odéon, Jatahy additionally solid a lady, the excellent Clotilde Hesme, as Hamlet, explaining in a playbill interview that her purpose was to refocus the story on three feminine characters: Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s mom, Gertrude. And whereas a feminine Hamlet is hardly information — the French star Sarah Bernhardt carried out the position again in 1886 — Jatahy’s premise seems to be promising for the primary few scenes.
Slouching on a sofa, Hesme cuts a grave determine as she rewinds a video: the message Hamlet receives from her murdered father, right here projected on a big scrim. After the ghost blames his brother, Polonius, the scene transitions seamlessly into a marriage — that of Polonius and the widowed Gertrude, who seals her new life with a karaoke rendition of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”
Servane Ducorps performs Gertrude with a chirpy power that contrasts properly with Hesme’s coolness. But as Jatahy’s “Hamlet” progresses, their interactions not often ring true, in no small half as a result of the characters have all been transplanted right into a humdrum modern inside. There, Gertrude and Polonius (a quasi-affable Matthieu Sampeur) attempt to play completely satisfied blended household. They sing candy nothings to one another over the kitchen desk, whereas Hamlet sulks within the nook.
It’s “Hamlet” as a Twenty first-century parent-child drama, with the odd interjection from Ophelia and her father, Claudius, who converse Portuguese — an try and sign their foreignness that as an alternative makes them seem like guests from one other play. Equally, whereas Isabel Abreu brings an earnest depth to the position of Ophelia, her relationship with Hesme’s Hamlet by no means settles into familiarity.
Her fortunate escape is equally contrived. Within the playbill, Jatahy says that in selecting to not die, Ophelia “refuses to be a toy within the face of patriarchal violence.” Though Abreu delivers the inserted textual content bravely, it’s such a jarring volte-face for her character.
In line with the Odéon’s publicity materials, 85 % of the textual content on this model is from Shakespeare’s unique “Hamlet.” But it not often feels as if Jatahy trusts the Bard. As a substitute, she wills the characters to flee his world, in an act of feminist defiance with no clear goal.
Throughout the Seine, Costa additionally follows her singular imaginative and prescient for “Macbeth” — her second manufacturing for the Comédie-Française after an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s “A Lady’s Story” — to the bitter finish.
Her staging of the Scottish play opens with an arresting tableau. Woman Macbeth sits hunched over, her face hidden beneath a matted mane. As she rips out clumps of her hair, a portrait of Macbeth, her husband, begins spinning on a wall behind her — till an invisible knife appears to chop into the portray.
It’s an ominous approach to place Woman Macbeth, as a shadow addition to the three witches who prophesy that Macbeth might be king. When the trio seems shortly afterward to ship their message, a large ring materializes above the empty stage. In true “Lord of the Rings” trend, it then descends upon Macbeth (Noam Morgensztern), metaphorically anointing him whilst recorded whispers of “homicide” fill the Comédie-Française’s auditorium.
Up to now, so spectacular. However Costa, an Italian native who has collaborated with the provocative director Romeo Castellucci and shares his style for visible symbolism, is so targeted on the imagery that “Macbeth” loses dramatic steam.
Compressing all the named characters into simply eight roles is a doubtful alternative given the sources of the Comédie-Française’s everlasting ensemble, and it results in a way of monotony. The three witches (Suliane Brahim, Jennifer Decker and Birane Ba) sometimes — and confusingly — double as random troopers and messengers, and when the Macbeths go on their murderous spree, there isn’t any one round to react to the destabilization of the dominion.
Perplexingly, heavy-handed Roman Catholic allegories additionally seep into this “Macbeth” halfway by means of, paralyzing the motion. The second half of the manufacturing takes place in entrance of a cumbersome backdrop exhibiting a winged altarpiece that’s fully blacked out. The banquet scene, wherein Macbeth is haunted by his victims’ ghosts, is confined to a small confessional.
In that scene, King Duncan, whose dying paves the way in which for Macbeth’s ascension, hovers like God surrounded by angels and martyrs. Macduff, who ultimately restores order by killing Macbeth, is costumed to look each inch like Jesus, all the way down to a wound in his facet that he reveals theatrically by opening his white gown.
There are Christian themes in “Macbeth,” however Costa takes them thus far that the characters disappear behind them. One of many final scenes reveals Jesus-Macduff overcoming Macbeth just by pointing a finger to his brow, as if performing a miracle.
Because of this, the manufacturing additionally undercuts Julie Sicard’s eerily shameless efficiency as Woman Macbeth. There isn’t any doubt all through that she has the higher hand: In reality, one scene even makes that time just a little too forcefully, when she pretends to breastfeed a childlike Macbeth and fingers him a pacifier.
The second is efficient in telegraphing a message, but so dramatically inconceivable that the characters begin to really feel like pawns within the director’s recreation. “Macbeth,” like “Hamlet” on the Odéon, is simply too multilayered to be subsumed right into a single grand concept. In Paris, no less than, it wasn’t to be.
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