Old Play in Manhattan

Macbeth (by William Shakespeare; produced by Theatre, Inc., in association with Brian Doherty), fortunately for the theater, is a great melodrama as well as a great tragedy. For in the theater the great tragedy does not easily stand forth. Shakespeare's high-placed, higher-seeking, larger-than-life criminals cannot seem tragic unless they first seem very grand, and unless Macbeth, at least, comes to seem as much haunted as hounded. Probably few real murderers have looked into such caverns of the imagination as Macbeth; the whole play, indeed, is as suffused with poetry as it is stained with blood.

Broadway's new Macbeth is far from great tragedy. As Lady Macbeth, Flora Robson (Ladies in Retirement) merely lacks audacity and fascination. As Macbeth, British Cinemactor Michael Redgrave (Mourning Becomes Electra, The Captive Heart) mauls the part and even does something to mar the play. His Macbeth is violent without being intense, neurotic without seeming imaginative; and taking Shakespeare's great lines in slow but unsure fashion, he strangles the poetry.

But Macbeth is still good melodrama. The next to shortest of Shakespeare's plays,* and certainly the scariest, it moves at top speed for three acts--from the first appearance of the Witches to the disappearance of Banquo's ghost. As Critic A. C. Bradley once pointed out, the fourth act of most very great Shakespeare (Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear) tends to slump. Last week's production slumps less than the play, and proceeds to a mighty laying-on of Macduff and a martial conclusion. Perhaps best of all, the new production catches an atmosphere of menace and an air of Scotland.

*Shortest: The Comedy of Errors.

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