Erin Harrington reviews Mr and Mrs Macbeth of Heathcote Valley Road, written and directed by Gregory Cooper, at the Court Theatre, Saturday 18 May, 2024.
In writer-director Gregory Cooper’s energetic new comedy Mr and Mrs Macbeth of Heathcote Valley Road it’s backstage on the opening night of a high stakes national tour of the Scottish play, and things are starting to spin out of control. We’re in the shared dressing room of Jo Macbeth (Lara Macgregor) – Lady M – and her husband Tom (Mark Hadlow), who are 30 years into their marriage and a shared career bringing Shakespeare to the masses. Tom’s been in a strop for weeks because despite being the 1995 entertainer of the year (glory days), he’s been downgraded to Macbeth’s understudy, so that Ian, a yoga-loving Art Green-like reality TV star, can headline, connect to a younger audience, and maybe make the production profitable. Jo, clearly the more sensible (and more talented?) of the two, is trying to make #grwm reels for her Instagram fans and actually prepare to go on stage. Tom sneaks whisky, plays with a putt-putt mini golf set, gets in the way of her prep, and generally hovers on the edge of a tantrum. It also turns out Taika is in the audience, scouting for a new film. Careers and finances are on the line. Decades worth of marital scrapping and barbed comic banter are pulled away to reveal a relationship on the rocks.
It’s a rich set up that provides the framing for a play that moves on and off-stage, revelling in the traditions of the theatre, playing with the relationship between life and art. Much of the audience find the action uproarious, especially as further accidents and roadblocks drive the behind-the-scenes drama into a farcical presentation of Macbeth itself. The body language of those around me, alongside my own growing discomfort, indicactes that this is not universal.
The Court’s production is a scaled up and localised presentation of Mr and Mrs Macbeth of Dodson Valley Road. This was first staged last year at Whakatū Nelson’s Theatre Royal as the premiere production of The Professional Theatre Co., a new company led by Hadlow as artistic director. A very exciting initiative. This production retains, and expands upon, the original creative team. The economical set, designed by Mark McIntyre, gives us the skeleton frame of the Macbeths’ shared dressing room, and allows us to see the performers race franticly between backstage areas and the stage proper. Lighting and sound move us between diegetic states on- and off-stage, and more subjective emotional registers. This isn’t entirely consistent, especially in moments when Jo and Tom drop into character backstage ahead of the show, and then later as action in the second act becomes increasingly farcical and stylised.
Cooper and Hadlow have a long history of collaboration, including the popular one-man touring show MAMIL (Middle Aged Man in Lycra). Cooper wrote this play specifically for Macgregor and Hadlow, two of the country’s most experienced performers, who’ve worked together for years. There is genuine joy, and a palimpsestic sense of satisfaction, in seeing performers with a long history of collaboration bounce off one another. We bring our own theatre histories to a show like this – especially one that’s riffing on the relationships between performers and audiences. I watch remembering the pair onstage in the Court’s terrific productions of God of Carnage (2010) and When the Rain Stops Falling (2014), and their collaboration in Norwegian black comedy Elling (2019), as well as Macbeth itself in 2016.
And yet, here it feels like something really isn’t right, both with the knockabout comedy (which often aims for easy, lowest common denominator laughs and highly exaggerated physical humour), but also the craft itself. I slide further into my seat, flinching every time Tom – more petty fading tyrant Lear than uncertain Macbeth – undermines and berates his competent wife, or takes the piss out of things like intimacy coordination, or we get stuck in repetitive comic loops that are only broken by insult or injury. Some jokes just make my companion and I feel yuck. I am confused, dramaturgically, at the swings in tone and genre, and the way rules of space, time and storytelling that are established in act one are mucked with in act two. I want consistency in the lighting, and especially in the spatial orientation of sound. Emotional turning points near the play’s climax, and then a slip into abstraction, don’t feel well scaffolded.
I am also not sure what to make of the couple’s endeavours; are they genuinely competent theatre-makers facing a night from hell, or hacks in cheap costumes transplanted from a Christopher Guest film? Are we meant to be rooting for the couple’s personal and professional success, or (in my case) hoping that Jo will take her Instagram followers, leave, and Eat, Pray, Love her way to happiness elsewhere? Who or what are we meant to be laughing at? Is this Macbeth actually meant to be good?
Curiously, even though Cooper riffs on some of Macbeth‘s best-known characters and lines, few of these concerns map thematically onto Shakespeare’s play, even though I can see gestures towards its structure. Perhaps we’re seeing an inversion in which Macbeth’s vaulting ambition, stoked by Lady Macbeth, becomes Jo Macbeth’s ambition (and financial pragmatism), sabotaged meanly by Tom’s jealousy and weakness? I’m not sure.
It’s important to say a large portion of the audience have the time of their lives, having got what they paid for and then some. Thighs are slapped, eyes are wiped, punchlines are repeated. I get that the play isn’t for me, and that taste is subjective, and that’s fine too. It’s for the people behind me laughing with, not at, light misogyny, and finding joy in references to Cold Duck, neither of which would be out of place in a production written three or more decades ago. This is a play that will make some people very happy, and help pay for other plays. As for me, I leave feeling frustrated, icky, and honestly a little insulted.
That said, I would be quite keen to see the show’s dark twin. There’s an incisive backstage psychological thriller about a bitter power struggle and mutually-assured destruction hovering just under the surface of this script. I’d pay good money to see Hadlow and Macgregor in that.
Mr and Mrs Macbeth of Heathcote Valley Road plays at the Court Theatre until 22 June.
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