“Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter,” is probably not the most memorable line in Shakespeare’s tale of havoc wrought by blind ambition and naked greed, but in director Jimmy Fay’s despairing new production at the Abbey, it has particular significance. The line is spoken by Rory Nolan, who emerges from a trapdoor with old-world Shakespearian aplomb in Act II, Scene III, coughing and spluttering, then emoting to the audience in a style most unlike anything else on the stage throughout the show. Most of the performances in this production are low key to the point almost of incoherent mumbling (for a reason, as we shall see). Nolan, by contrast, addresses the audience: he plays to the crowd as if we were seated in the Globe, and speaks directly to us about the meaning of this text at this time in this country. The catalogue of spectres he speaks of knocking at the metaphoric hell-gate of Macbeth’s castle after the murder of King Duncan (John Kavanagh) is different than the canon: the farmer “that hanged himself on expectation of plenty” is here named a banker; the equivocator “that could swear in both scales against either scale” is a priest, and the English tailor who steals out of French hose becomes a politician stealing out of “Anglo”. Ah, the dusty death of the Celtic Tiger it is, then.

Paul O’Mahony’s set reinforces this reading. Steel girders jut from the walls, suggesting castle buttresses, yes, but clearly post-industrial. A massive and all-too visually significant pile of gravel and sand occupies stage left, piled against the wall forming an obstacle over which characters must climb. It is an abandoned building site. Half-rusted wire mesh marks a border between the active stage space and the screen against which some action is later silhouetted, and the sliding doors that facilitate changes of scene look like painted shutters over closed shop fronts. A single stairway leading upwards from centre stage right suggests that the bulk of the action in this ‘castle’ is taking place underground, in the rotten bowels of a decaying, abandoned, unfinished monument to ambition and greed over which men fight and die with bloody conviction. Although the costumes, which are great, might suggest Cromwell, this is definitely the New Dark Age of recessionary Ireland.

Macbeth himself is played by Aidan Kelly as a sort of gormless drunk, carried along by a current he has no real control of. Though he and Lady Macbeth (Eileen Walsh) make a grab for power, they have no inkling of what to do with it. He is paranoid and greedy and just wants more certainty that the party won’t end. She seems happy enough to have the throne, and becomes alarmed when her husband’s guilty ravings threaten to derail her affluent bliss. Kelly is never commanding on stage, portraying the character as not so much driven by ambition as keen to benefit from circumstance: not so much a schemer as an opportunist who can’t believe his luck. The actor frequently speaks with a cadence that suggests he’s not at all sure of what he’s going to say before he says it, like a man without conviction speaking lines that are right for the purpose, but not felt. This seems to be a question of choice, and not a lack of skill in execution, though sometimes the result is awkward for timing and for generating drama. Likewise Walsh is not nearly as fearsome a Lady Macbeth as we are used to seeing. She concludes most of her lines with an audible and pointed intake of breath, as if each one exhausts her. She wants power all right, but seems unusually turned on by her husband’s half-baked notion that he might tip the scales of fate a bit and enact the Witches’ prophecy. The Witches themselves (Brid Ní Neachtain, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh, Grainne Keenan) are potent enough: howling in Irish and Latin, enacting superstitious rituals and calling forth visions from the beyond. This atavism of the peasant past and its religious legacy haunts Macbeth, but its power eludes him as easily as true power does when he is King. He is not really King, after all: he is a chancer, a usurper whose fleeting moment of success came at the cost of murder. Wow. Could this be any more allegorical if it tried? 

But it is trying. Fay’s Macbeth is genuinely engaged in thinking through this text and giving voice to a reading that makes sense right now. On this level it hits hard and true, and the pig’s head on a stick that sits grinning at the audience from Act I, Scene I had me thinking of The Lord of the Flies and screaming “allegory!” from the outset. But the production isn’t particularly gripping, and the weakened leads, though clearly deliberately stripped of gravitas and command, leave the play without a strong centre on the stage itself. This production can be ‘read’ all right, but it lacks real emotion; there’s a dearth of tangible drama. As a commercial production, it may leave schoolchildren and punters feeling cheated. But at least it’s not signifying nothing.

Dr. Harvey O'Brien teaches at the UCD O'Kane Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin.