The Relapse
THE Theatre Workshop production of Macbeth (Theatre Royal, Stratford, E) is an acute case of recidivism and ought to be seen by a great many people on the Chinese principle by which criminals are exhibited to the public under humiliating circumstances. According to the old Marxist theory the theatre has a high educational mission, served only by stripping away sentimental bourgeois accretions and setting The People face to face with reality. The 'educational' theory is preposterous heresy, of course, but let that pass: the point here is that the experience of the Twenties proved (even to Brecht) that you teach nothing in the theatre unless you employ such 'bourgeois' tricks as illusion, poetry and sentiment to capture the imagination. Miss Joan Littlewood has gone back to arid doctrinaire asceticism. By use of a mud-coloured skeletal set, semi-modern battle dress, savage cutting of the text and coarse- grained acting she succeeds in turning Macbeth into a tedious lesson in a long-condemned class- room. It is an awful warning.
13. w.
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