THE STAGE: Sound & Fury

Just before she went onstage as Lady Macbeth at Boston’s brand-new, nylon-roofed arena theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan McKenna sent a note to her costar, Jason Robards Jr. “Dear Macbeth,” she wrote. “It’s funny that after all these years I haven’t got to know your first name. I want you to know that yours is the most moving and truly poetic Macbeth I have ever known.” When the play was finished, apart from critics who claimed to miss polish and high oratorical style, the cheering audience was willing to go Siobhan one better. The response suggested that the production (headed for Broadway in the fall) may be one of the most spectacular Shakespearean shows yet seen.

As staged by Director Jose (Long Day’s Journey into Night) Quintero, the tragedy emerged a moving mixture of sound and fury, dark plots, and love destroyed by desperate ambition. The night was filled with Quintero’s sound effects—the frantic music of bagpipes, thunder, the clangor of horses’ hoofs, bells, and. in the sudden striking silences, the rasp of crickets. Armies fought across the front of the vast Elizabethan stage with such intensity that those in front-row seats pulled back in alarm. Offstage entrances brought the action into the far reaches of the theater; Macbeth strode out to meet the three weird, raffia-haired witches from the very back edge of the theater; Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane down every aisle.

Opening-night rough spots, largely owing to lack of rehearsal time and uncertain acoustics in the new house, hurt the performances. But Actor Robards, with his long, brooding spade-jawed scowl, was almost always convincing as the man of honor changing slowly into an unwilling miscreant and finally into a ruthless, sneering, hell-bent King. Outstanding moments: his bloody babbling after Macbeth murders Duncan (“Macbeth does murder sleep”), the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech as he holds his dead wife in his arms. Actress McKenna made her Lady Macbeth warm and feminine (“I feel people should have compassion for the sinners of the world”). In the sleepwalking scene, her red hair streaming above a white, wispy gown and her hands scrubbing themselves in ghastly compulsion, Actress McKenna put on the greatest mad scene seen in the U.S. since Callas’ Lucia di Lammermoor.