Theater: Power and Lust

MACBETH by William Shakespeare

The Vivian Beaumont Theater at Manhattan's Lincoln Center is the dramatic equivalent of Russian roulette. It is played with breathtaking regularity at this house, which in 15 years of fitful existence has never had any precisely defined aesthetic goal or financial stability. As a result, the persisting apprehension is that any given season, even any given production, may be the last.

After Joseph Papp relinquished his caretakership in 1977, the theater was dark for three years. Relit this season under the overall command of Richmond Crinkley the Vivian Beaumont is gambling on name-brand appeal involving such diverse talents as Woody Allen, Edward Albee and Ellis Rabb. One of the group, Sarah Caldwell. best known for staging operas, makes her Broadway directorial debut with Macbeth. While this production may not kindle a blaze of excitement it is engaging enough to pose no threat of killing off the Beaumont.

Caldwell stresses the lust for power and the power of lust. Her casting emphasizes the second even more than the first. Rarely have two actors so young and so full of animal magnetism played the two key roles Philip Anglim, best known for his work as John Merrick in The Elephant Man brings to his Macbeth the boundless energy of a fledgling Henry V. The shapely Maureen Anderman makes Lady Macbeth a hot-blooded sex symbol. One can visualize the pair being written up in the gossip columns as smart society's latest darlings and very much on the rise.

This sort of approach does have its drawbacks. The desolating pathos of madness is missing from Anderman's mad scene. Nothing in Anglim's countenance suggests that he has "supp'd full with horrors " But the political core of the play remains intact. Macbeth is a politician's tragedy. It is full of the cagey schemes and ruthless deeds by which men seek to attain and hold power, and of the cruel downfall which they court.

Caldwell is willing to sacrifice some of the Shakespeare text for pageantry and graphic effects. The guests at the feast where Banquo's ghost appears are seated on one side of a long refectory table resembling the one in Da Vinci's The Last Supper, thus carrying resonances of sacrilege.

The crowned heirs of Banquo, foretold by the three witches, march with a stately heraldic tread across a narrow catwalk that spans the upper rear stage like a suspension bridge. In these and other scenes, the director groups and separates her players with a painter's eye Individual playgoers may cavil at some of the liberties that Caldwell takes with Shakespeare, but few could deny that she represents a fresh, colorful and audacious directorial presence in the theater. —By T.E. Kalem