Something Wicked This Way Comes
Act Now! Theatre Company @ Greenwich Playhouse
8-12 July
Tragedy, monologues and cackling: welcome to Something Wicked This Way Comes. This new play, ‘written’ and directed by David Hunt, cuts and pastes about a dozen of Shakespeare’s best/worst villains into one play, examining what really drives them to evil and who’s in control. Macbeth’s three witches hold everything together, the malevolent puppet masters to the villains who tread their different paths to wickedness.
The plot is wafer thin and actually reminded me of those musicals like Mamma Mia!, where someone thought that the pre-existing music (or in this case characters) was so good that hanging them together by a loose story thread would be a recipe for success. Well, David Hunt’s certainly picked the ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Voulez Vouz’ equivalents of Shakespeare’s evil creations for Something Wicked – Lady Macbeth, Iago, Goneril & Regan, Edmund, are all there and all just as heinous as Shakespeare intended. The language retains all its staggering beauty and complexity in transition and Hunt weaves his original lines in admirably seamlessly. The actors’ performances are straight from the Royal Shakespeare Company text book – manic, hysterical and tormented – with special mention going to young Jess Leavins (Witch 2, Regan), who plays her evil a little more subtly and is quite the most charismatic presence.
For Shakespeare fans like me it’s an interesting premise but my companion, who isn’t as intimately familiar with the plays, found it a little inaccessible – it switches between plays very quickly and focuses on self analyzing soliloquies rather than the acts of murder, rape and madness themselves. The plot follows a cyclical structure that is allegorically effective in stressing the circle-of-hell theme, but sacrifices momentum in the process. It’s more of a study than a story and at two-and-a-half hours it’s a very long psychology lesson just to teach us that lust, revenge and megalomania are generally the main drivers for acts of evil, if we didn’t know that already.
Perhaps I am a purist but I do wonder whether Something Wicked rather misses Shakespeare’s point in only exploring one end of the morality scale that so fascinated the Bard. Shakespeare’s plays work by having light and shade as equal partners: there are both good and bad characters (and good and bad within characters), funny moments as well as serious and periods of action to counteract the soliloquising. Something Wicked, in its quest for the deepest depths of human despair, does away with many of these counterpoints and consequently the evil loses some of its power. It’s also utterly exhausting watching such an intricate and unrelenting tirade of wickedness and I think I’ve had my lifetime’s quota of cackling. Much like Abba’s songs do for Mamma Mia!, it’s the Bard’s words that rescue this play, with everything else merely secondary and ultimately rather forgettable.