McAnuff’s ‘Macbeth’ Brings the Beast Down at La Jolla Playhouse

“Macbeth,” the bad-luck play, is likely to bring good luck to the La Jolla Playhouse. Director Des McAnuff doesn’t take the abstract, conceptual route with Shakespeare’s tragedy. His staging is bloody, bold and resolute, and he brings the beast down.

It’s evident that McAnuff has staged the play before outside (at the Stratford, Ontario, Festival.) He knows its traps and its electrical circuits, and he is not afraid to overload them. Despite its stripped look, there’s an old-fashioned theatricality about the production that serves the story well.

Macbeth (John Vickery) and Lady Macbeth (Barbara Williams) have their own spotlights, for example. This proves to be a practical solution to the problem of how to light a play that happened largely in the dark (Chris Parry did the lighting), while also harking back to the days when “Macbeth” was a display piece for two great stars--Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, for example.

McAnuff doesn’t neglect his ensemble at La Jolla, but he realizes the soundness of the star approach. “Macbeth” is a show piece--almost an opera. That’s one reason Vickery is so satisfying in it. He’s got a big, round, dark voice--dark with glimmers of light in it. He makes the great soliloquies resound at La Jolla, as they are meant to do. To say that Vickery sings the role would give the wrong impression; but he fills his lines with music, never once at the expense of thought.

Physically too, he makes you see Macbeth--a big, rather sluggish warrior who doesn’t take the initiative until pointed towards it. An ideal second-in-command, but not quite ruthless enough to make the hard choices every day and not look back.

Even at the end of the play, Vickery’s Macbeth hasn’t totally hardened. By that time, however, the spectator is all in favor of his being eradicated. McAnuff’s staging of the slaughter of Lady Macduff (Kate Malin) and her children, including a baby that they have tried to hide, takes care of any lingering sympathy that we might feel for the tyrant as a man. We are glad to see his head on a pole.

One can get involved with this “Macbeth.” McAnuff’s production does, however, have a glaring weakness. Barbara Williams’ Lady Macbeth turns old-fashioned theatricalism into soap opera. It’s impossible to see her as the brains of the outfit, the one who steels her husband to pick up the knife. She’s too busy demonstrating her own emotions. The time for that is the sleep-walking scene, and not before.

As the study of a tragic couple, McAnuff’s “Macbeth” doesn’t convince. But Vickery does provide an absorbing study of a man consciously transforming himself into a beast, alternately high on his new recklessness and sickened by it. And we see what it is going to take to stop him.

The scene where Malcolm (John Walcutt) tests Macduff (Randle Mell) has an uncommon muscularity and urgency. But it also has thought. Can a flawed man lead a crusade? The question will hit Mell’s Macduff in the vitals when he learns about his family, and here too there’s a transformation, to the role of avenger. Exciting stuff, and not simplistic.

Visually, the production takes some getting used to. McAnuff apparently first came across “Macbeth” in the Classic Comics version, when he was a kid. (Only a very confident director would admit this.) Deborah Dryden’s costumes reflect this source. They never quite become comic, but they do test the limit in the early conclave scenes, where people are clanking around in boots, animal skins and strange metal vests. It is almost “Conan the Barbarian” time.

In contrast, John Arnone’s set does take an abstract approach, using moving slatted walls to evoke the throne rooms and banquet halls of the story, and to half-mask some of the nastier deeds perpetrated there, such as the Macduff blood bath.

The mix works, in its Post-Modern way. And so does McAnuff’s very bold approach to the porter-at-the-gate sequence. Actor Jefferson Mays virtually dumps the comedy into the audience’s lap, and one sees that this is exactly what Shakespeare had in mind--something to keep the groundlings happy and connected with the story.

Not all of McAnuff’s choices work that well. You want to hand the Macbeths a roll of paper towels as they go tripping downstairs after the murder, without even a thought that some blood might be getting on the floor. Still, the choices are strongly made, and the play comes through. Give Shakespeare half a chance and he’ll do that.

Plays at the Mandell Weiss Center, UC San Diego, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road. Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Closes Nov. 19. Tickets: $18-$25. (619) 534-3960.