Synetic Theater has opened its latest season with a remounting of its acclaimed 2007 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a wordless, movement-driven production of visionary intensity and startling originality.
The multiple Helen Hayes Award-winning troupe has developed a highly stylized, viscerally thrilling brand of physical theater that brings together elements of dance, mime, physical comedy, acrobatics, and fight choreography. Synetic’s Shakespeare may be wordless, but it is not text-less, and the ensemble’s remarkable technical virtuosity serves not only to tell the basic narratives but also to express subtleties of characterization and the deeper subtexts of the plays.
Irina Tsikurishvili as Lady Macbeth, Mary Werntz and Philip Fletcher as Witches. Photo by Graeme B. Shaw.
No other Shakespearean play, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, unfolds with such unrelenting speed as Macbeth, and Paata Tsikurishvili and Nathan Weinberger’s 90-minute adaptation sustains the terrifying action at a breathtaking pace. The production, in essence, treats the Scottish play as a succession of energetic set pieces, with composer Konstantine Lortkipanidze’s haunting, rhythmically insinuating score helping to sustain an atmosphere of pervasive fear and dread.
Tsikurishvili’s staging takes a familiar approach by setting Macbeth in a modern, militaristic state, yet it opens the action with an interpolated scene portraying the forces of violent religious extremism (embodied by the three witches) displacing traditional religion (represented by a pope, imam, and rabbi). Synetic’s Macbeth, as Tsikurishvili explains in his director’s note, is “a tale of a great and powerful general who ultimately warps and destroys himself and his country through a mystical indoctrination from which he cannot break free.”
Such an interpretation, which removes the powerful ambiguity of the witches’ scenes, is not really supported by the text nor does it illuminate the play. Thankfully, the directorial concept does not intrude upon a production that succeeds in capturing so much of the uncanny power of Shakespeare’s play: the nature of ambition and desire, the relationship between action and the imagination, and, most crucially, the sexual dynamics that lie at the heart of the Macbeths’ intense marital bond. The famous scene in which Lady Macbeth goads her husband on to murder is played as a fiery pas de deux, driven by Lady Macbeth’s sexual taunting and culminating in a passionate tango after Macbeth commits himself to regicide.
Irakli Kavsadze as Macbeth. Salma Shaw, Ryan Tumulty, Ryan Sellers and Maya Brettell as ghosts. Photo by Graeme B. Shaw.
As the production cannot rely upon verbal narration for exposition, Tsikurishvili and Weinberger choose to stage events left crucially offstage by Shakespeare, including Macbeth’s killing of Duncan and the rape and murder of Lady Macduff. Yet these moments lose little in dramatic power by not being left unseen, as they emerge as before us as nightmarish phantasmagorias – dream visions from a dark and terrifying imagination. And in an innovative take on one of Shakespeare’s most famous set pieces, Tsikurishvili stages the banquet scene as a darkly comic tour de force of ensemble acting, using a backdrop of stylized, comedic action to isolate Macbeth’s tormented conscience.
As Macbeth, Irakli Kavsadze brings an imposing physicality and a brutality to his portrayal of a character for whom murder all too quickly becomes the primary means of self-expression. Yet it is with his eyes – like a silent film star – that Kavsadze captures most vividly Macbeth’s dramatic arc: fear, trepidation, grim determination, remorse, ruthlessness, isolation, and the nihilism inherent in his refusal to grieve the death of his wife. The radiant Irina Tsikurishvili, who also choreographed the production, gives us a passionate, fiercely determined Lady Macbeth who recognizes her sexual power over her husband and awakens in him a bloody ambition – and who falls apart before our eyes once their intimate bond is broken.
Running time: Approximately 90 minutes.
Macbeth runs through October 2nd at Synetic Theater – in Crystal City. For tickets, call (800) 494-8497 or purchase them online.
