Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, is going to move to New York City. The show is currently playing a 10-week season at the Gielgud Theatre in London, England. Following its closing on 1 December 2007, it will move to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for a six-week engagement beginning 12 February 2008.
Stewart, who gained genre fame as Captain Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, plays the title character, while Fleetwood is Lady Macbeth. The rest of the cast includes Paul Shelley, Scott Handy, Ben Carpenter, Martin Turner, Michael Feast, Mark Rawlings, Tim Treloar, Bill Nash, Christopher Knott, Oliver Birch,Christopher Nolan, Hywel John, Suzanne Burden, Polly Frame, Niamh McGrady, and Sophie Hunter.
Broadway.com says “this austere production places Macbeth in a timeless and nameless country, with a law of its own. Disturbing and unsettling, the play centres on the building tensions, paranoia and fear that lead to violence and murder.” The UK’s Evening Standard said “Rupert Goold’s Macbeth of a lifetime is almost permanently set in the vicinity of a kitchen sink and a refrigerator. It manages, though, freshly to convey the elemental sense of surprise, shock and supernatural horror that must have attended the tragedy’s early 17th-century performances and has long since been lost.”
BAM describes the show as “one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest dramas, Stewart plays Macbeth—a man utterly determined to obtain the royal crown. Aided by his even more ambitious and ruthless wife, Macbeth murders the king and a comrade only to lose it all by the plays’ end.” They go on to quote a review from The Times of London: “Stewart’s performance is entirely fresh, yet it calls to mind every despot from Stalin to Saddam. It’s the dark, throbbing heart of a production of blood, guts and brilliance.” BAM then continues “Goold takes inspiration from Stalin and the Great Terror, setting his production within a subterranean kitchen that serves as a military hospital in a timeless and nameless country.” Goold previously directed Stewart in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest.
Following the performance on 17 February will be a BAMdialogue with Patrick Stewart, which will be free to same-day ticket holders. Tickets at BAM will be $30, $60, and $90.