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By PAUL LITTLE

MACBETH, by William Shakespeare, directed by Michael Hurst, Maidment Theatre, Auckland (to June 26)

There are Crimean War-era nurses where the witches should be at the start of this production of Macbeth. It works for me--nurses can be much scarier than crones in pointy hats waving rubber frogs around. It's an indication that this version of the tragedy will add to, rather than subtract from, the text and provide some real horror, which is not long in coming.

Macbeth, for Hurst's The Large Group, follows his superlative Hamlet of last year, using much the same creative team and techniques. Again the ghosts are light and noise, and the set is as bare as it would have been in Shakespeare's time, forcing the words to create the scenes. No cardboard trees come to Dunsinane. There's a lot of smoke. It creeps through everything, like the evil that overtakes Macbeth as he moves from being a man who can't act on his desires, to a man who can't desire anything without acting on it.

Hurst's two Shakespeare productions have been commendably businesslike. His business is to present Shakespeare's play, so there's no more messing around with the text than is good for it. The action is kept clean and clear, paced and blocked crisply and efficiently.

Hurst finds things in Macbeth that it's easy to overlook--there is, we realise, almost as much punning and paradox as in Hamlet. He also pays due attention to the timely themes of violence, statehood and good leadership &endash; the final image is of a Nurse/Witch mopping up blood. With Macbeth gone, the clean-up has begun.

As for those additions, the director's touches are always illuminating. A boy (the preternaturally talented Edward Giffney) acts as the witches' familiar, delivering many of their most chilling lines. The deceased Duncan becomes the Porter, complete with rubber knives protruding from his chest, turning that character's 400-year-old jokes into the genuinely macabre laugh-getters that they probably were for the original audience.

Much of the fun goes when Lady Macbeth (a riveting Anna Hewlett) dies. Hurst deals with this by accelerating the action to its conclusion in a knock-down brawl between Macbeth and Macduff, using techniques that will be familiar to any viewer of RAW. I saw a wrestling performance at the Armageddon sci-fi/comics convention (attended by the Hercules crowd &endash; Hurst's other demographic). The Maidment version was much more convincing. Tell those kids: Shakespeare still does the best on-stage violence.

©Copyright 2004, Sunday Star-Times

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