As with the Auckland season, we recently offered another guest blogger the chance to attend Macbeth opening night in Wellington and share their thoughts on the show. Sarah Chesney was our lucky guest, and below is her blog on Wellington's opening night of Macbeth...

"A performance to equal last year’s impressive Eugene Onegin is no easy task, but The NBR New Zealand Opera production of Verdi’s Macbeth was fiery from beginning to end.

Michele Kalmandi sings Macbeth superbly, his voice shifting easily from a vivid, full sound to the cupa or hollowness Verdi demands.  As Lady Macbeth, Antonia Cifrone is formidable, her second act aria, ‘La luce langue’, captivating and resolute. She sustains a vocal intensity throughout the opera from the brilliance and polish of her bursts of coloratura in the brindisi to the sense of controlled detachment in her mad scene. 

The production conveys all of Verdi’s fast-paced dramatic continuity. The three main props – three blasted trees, a bed and a folding screen – are used to good effect, particularly the screen, which successfully differentiates between public and private spaces within the unchanging, shady scenery. Although later in opera some of the dramatic sense is lost when the trees and bed are used together, confounding any distinction between inside and outside. This is especially obvious in Act 4 when the introduction of Lady Macbeth’s sonnambulismo is used to change the scene from Scottish border to bedroom and Lady Macbeth must carefully and sanely pick her way through the branches.

The fantastical element of Macbeth is limited in this production. Rather than prophesising, the witches appear to make ‘educated guesses’, garnering their information from the newspaper scraps they sweep up. The witches are the fundamental dramatic impetus of the opera. Three of them maintain a constant presence on stage, serving as a visible extension of their permeating voice in Verdi’s score. With not a cauldron in sight they sneakily stalk the stage, half-crouched, as cleaners and midwives. In Act 3, they deliver perhaps the descendents of Banquo, who they predicted would father kings in the first act. At the very least, the witches’ mischievous dance, tossing the babies amongst themselves and fashioning them tiny crowns to wear, presents a symbol of life. This scene is contrasted with (but doesn’t completely justify) the superfluous action of the prelude, in which Lady Macbeth suffers a miscarriage.

The performance was punctuated by the gasps of horror from the person sitting beside me. Lady Macbeth enters the stage in a bloodstained dress (gasp). The witches slide back the screen to reveal King Duncan’s murdered body (gasp). The assassins leap from the trees to attack Banquo (gasp). My neighbour’s reaction attests that even if the fantastic is absent, it is offset by the shock of violence, on-stage death and gripping dramatics. However, perhaps director Tim Albery could have followed Verdi’s lead and limited the continuous literal depictions of the characters’ thoughts and visions to Banquo’s ghost and the apparitions. Little is left to the audience’s imagination – or the music – when all is visible on stage.

The banquet scene was particularly brilliant. The chorus developed the unsettling mood, reacting against Macbeth’s flights of madness and Lady Macbeth’s exaggerated attempts at diversion during her brindisi. The only blip in an otherwise sensation performance by the Chapman Tripp chorus was the weak assassins’ chorus – too sotto voce even for Macbeth – which briefly showed an imbalance between singers and orchestra evident in a couple of passages. Overall though, the Vector Wellington orchestra perform admirably under the direction of Guido Ajmone Marsan. The nuances of Verdi’s score were well executed and the interplay between the winds in their solo passages and with the vocal lines was especially notable. 

Of the supporting roles, Roman Shulackoff shone as Macduff.  His tormented Act 4 aria (‘Ah, la paterna mano’) was memorable for his sustained phrasing and lyricism.  Jud Arthur’s Banquo was assured and rich, his entrance as the ghost, wrenching off his bloodied clothes prompted a final gasp from my neighbour.  Macbeth ended spectacularly with the original 1847 ending, suitably updated to the production’s Cold War-era staging.  It was, by a whisker, my highlight of the performance." 

Sarah Chesney, guest blogger

Verdi's Macbeth is never going to be a jolly romp on the moors, but if you're expecting to see kilts and bonny Caledonian witches with sprigs of heather in their buttonholes, you're going to be surprised by Tim Albery's production. He is the operatic master of getting straight to the point: a director who admits that he's not crazy about props or terribly interested in baddies and goodies. And Tim's award-winning Macbeth (first performed by Opera North in the UK in 2008) is a textbook example of his style: "I go for extreme narrative clarity - I tend to pare things right back and Macbeth has a very simple narrative thrust. It's incredibly fluid: there aren't scene changes and you don't have to go anywhere because you're there all the time. What I like about it is it's just so savage and brutal. It doesn't mess about. No long overtures. He just gets on with it."

He being Verdi, a man who might have been reading from the same songbook, as it were, when he adapted Shakespeare's potent tragedy for the opera stage. "Verdi leaves out a whole lot of stuff that doesn't interest him," Tim continues. "I think it's a brilliant chopping job, but he still deals with the heart of it. You don't get nearly as much of Macbeth's internal narrative as you do in the play. His intellectual emotional crisis is really the crux of the whole play and I think in the opera, the way we chose to look at it, Lady Macbeth's becomes very much an equal tragic journey. She gets relatively more air time."

So, what will it look like? Not Scottish, that's for sure. "It's vaguely mid-to-late-20thcentury, possibly European-ish," Tim says helpfully. "I didn't want to do something that was period in another way, but it's got to be a militarised society, that's the first thing." There will be guys in possibly fascistic army uniforms, menacing thugs in dinner jackets and an army of cleaning ladies (the witches) who maintain a constant presence and knit - like tricoteuses during the French Revolution - while the horrifying action unfolds around them. Plus blood, blood and more blood.

Why not a bit more Braveheart and a bit less Ceauşescu's Romania? "You see the story: a dinner jacket. You don't have to look at it. A woman in a black cocktail dress. You don't have to think about it. It just says these are people with wealth and money. This is the power élite. That's all you need to know. I wanted to get to the heart of this relationship between these two people in this strange world and it didn't feel to me that it would help us to make it specific. So it was just about saying, 'Do we need that? Nah, we don't. Get rid of it. Let's not do it. Keep it simple so that it just really zones in on these people.'"

With such a straight-downthe-line philosophy, it's hard to imagine that Tim just fell into directing, but he did, in the classic right-time-right-place situation. With a degree in French from Manchester University, he was wondering what to do with his life. He'd done some production management and backstage work at university and directed a play by default, after someone else couldn't do it. That led to his being a guinea pig on a brand-new drama course at the university: his alumni included actors Julie Walters and Mary McDonnell (Kevin Costner's love interest in Dances with Wolves), TV writer Peter Flannery and Tim's longtime accomplice theatre designer and director Antony McDonald. "We were quite a radical, difficult group. We weren't crazy about the guy who was supposed to be running the course so we sacked him and started inviting in directors who we knew about. It was actually a fantastic, immediate concrete kind of training."

Tim went out into the world in 1974 with a fresh qualification and a head full of genrebending ideas. He did "a huge amount of things", often in alternative theatre, and built up a formidable repertoire and reputation. But opera was about to get him. "In about 1983, I was asked by this guy who rang me up out of the blue saying he'd seen some of my theatre and thought I might be good at opera. I said, 'Look, I've only ever seen one opera in my life and it was a nightmare!' It was grim: a tiny little tenor wearing high-heeled shoes because he was so short, a big, fat soprano - all the clichés you could imagine about opera. And he said, 'Just listen to it. Don't just turn it away like that.' And in fact it was The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten, which for a theatre director is a brilliant thing to start with in opera because there are no big choruses, it's pretty much a linear narrative and very seldom do three people sing at once."

The opera was a festival in a village in Tuscany and - needless to say - it was a done deal. Now, all these years later, Tim is talking to me from Santa Fe, where he is directing The Magic Flute in the desert. "God, how lucky is that?" he says. "It's great going to a rehearsal in the morning and someone sings for you instead of some dreary actor muttering away and looking at the script."

But he'll never abandon theatre. Now based in Toronto with his Canadian wife Patti, it's largely geography that keeps him away from the stage. "Since I've been here, I've only directed two theatre works, partly because theatre is much more native-culture-based than opera, which is international. I'm increasingly wanting to do more radical things. I don't really want to do straight plays any more."

Diana Balham, Publications Editor