Sexual Chemistry Sans Catalyst MACBETH

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Superstitious theater folk call it "the Scottish play." For them, merely to speak its name is to invite worse agonies than any conjured from eye of newt and toe of frog. More rational observers, too, view Macbeth as fraught with difficulties. Its plot cannot work unless skeptical modern audiences will believe in witches and the supernatural. The central couple kill in unforeshadowed haste and repent in wearisome leisure. As a tyrant, Macbeth seems a paranoiac cross between Herod, slaughtering a legion of innocents to be sure he got the right one, and the pathetic people who kill entire families on purported instruction from God. Thus it is scant surprise that the Macbeth that opened on Broadway last week used up three directors, two sets and five Macduffs during a six-city tryout tour.

Despite the bumpy beginnings, the production has triumphed at the box office. It took in $599,964 in one week in Toronto, believed to be a world record for a nonmusical, and reached Broadway with advance sales of $2 million.

TV ads suggest an intriguing sexual ambivalence: Christopher Plummer's feline grace vs. Glenda Jackson's vulpine ferocity, his moody introspection vs. her forthright speech and action. Alas, what sounds like explosive chemistry proves inert. The missing catalyst is a directorial idea of what the play is about, a point of view. From the opening declamatory rant of a wounded soldier to the final hortatory hollowness of the youth who supplants Macbeth, volume substitutes for meaning. This fish stinks from the head: Plummer copes with the poetry of "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" by denaturing it in monotone; Jackson distracts attention from her shrillness by twitching, fidgeting, and slithering her hands over her torso in erotic confusion.

There are cinematic scene shifts, striking tableaux and, too late to help, affecting moments for Macduff and the wife and son whom he unknowingly abandons to their murder. At the end, Macbeth and Macduff duel in silhouette, then tumble behind a row of soldiers, so there is momentary doubt about who felled whom. But surely almost everyone knows the plot: such pseudo surprise is no substitute for the deeper astonishment of fresh insight into two of the great archetypes in world drama.