London Theater Journal: The Young and the Restless

LONDON â€" A cruel virus is gnawing at the entrails of James McAvoy, who is delivering a star turn that sears in the title role of Jamie Lloyd’s production of “Macbeth” at Trafalgar Studios. Among the symptoms: coughing, vomiting, gagging, falling down while hallucinating and smiling in the midst of dire situations, as if at some torturous private joke.

Then there’s the matter of all that blood, his and others’, that’s usually visible on much of his body. But that seems to be less a symptom than a cause. This virile, able-bodied solider has been felled by the habit of killing. Murdering people, even in the name of king and country, can make a man pathologically sick. Of course this one is also afflicted by what he calls, with wondering contempt, “vaulting ambition.”

Being ambitious is traditionally regarded witha warier eye in Britain than in the United States. And the tolls it takes on the young and restless is being charted in two of the most sensational performances on London stages this season. In addition to Mr. McAvoy’s Thane of Cawdor, there’s the brilliant Kate O’Flynn’s Racheal Keats, the perpetually thwarted working-class heroine of Simon Stephens’s “Port” at the National Theater.

These two could hardly be more different in many ways, starting with their sex and provenance. And while Macbeth is a much-studied embodiment of the dictum “Be careful what you wish for,” Racheal is a relatively unknown example of what happens when ardent prayers are never answered. But both roles allow their portrayers to make their marks in ways that define careers, as they ferociously vent the hunger of groping souls in harsh environments.

In Mr. Lloyd’s “Macbeth,” which is packing in refreshingly un-gray-headed audiences, t! hat country is, as it always has been, Scotland, but of tomorrow instead of the Middle Ages. A post-performance discussion with Mr. Lloyd was advertised with the title “Apocalypse Now: Is It the End of the World as We Know It”

The designer Soutra Gilmour has accordingly created an ecologically stripped, war-blighted landscape where the sun has ceased to shine and 21st-century technology has stopped functioning, aside from occasional salvaged gadgets like those computer tablets with which the three witches illuminate their faces. This is “Mad Max” territory, and it can feel a wee bit forced.

Also unnecessary. Because it’s not as a vision of a desolate future that this “Macbeth” compels but as a portrait of a military mind undone. From the moment the gore starts to fly in the opening scenes of this production, we see that violence has become a conditioned reflex for its characters, who have lived too long in a state of war. (Hugh Ross’s gently spoken Duncan feels like a relic from nother age; his imminent death is inevitable.)

Mr. McAvoy - who earned his stripes as a two-fisted movie actor in films like “X-Men: First Class” - could do Macbeth the action hero in his sleep. What he gives us in addition is the brain-jarring consequences of working as a killing machine.

This Macbeth is not, you suspect, an innately imaginative person, or at least he’s never defined himself that way. But suddenly he’s having visions, and they’re scaring the hell out of him. And once his wife (a raw, blazingly young Claire Foy) pushes him into murdering his King, the already blurred line between war and peace-time behavior dissolves entirely, along with the military discipline that has kept him intact.

That the words “post-traumatic stress disorder” are summoned in the program notes doesn’t sound like just a bid for topicality. Mr. McAvoy’s performance brings to mind accounts of soldiers harrowed by their ti! me in Ira! q. When this Macbeth finally bites the toxic dust, it feels like a suicide. What’s more, you suspect that the survivors left on stage will eventually follow suit.

The streets of Stockport in northern England, the setting for Mr. Stephens’s “Port,” are nowhere near as bloody. But at times they feel almost as bleak. Stockport is the home town of both Mr. Stephens (“Harper Regan,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”) and this production’s celebrated director, Marianne Elliott (“War Horse”). So presumably they know whereof they spea in conjuring a place where every road seems to lead to a dead end.

This is terrain that British writers and filmmakers have mined since the 1950’s, from Alan Sillitoe to Mike Leigh. And with its familiar roster of addictions, petty crime and domestic abuses, you may feel at first that it’s not worth revisiting. But Mr. Stephens and Ms. O’Flynn have shaped a vital and surprisingly original character in Racheal, whose mother (shades of “Harper Regan”) leaves her husband and young children shortly after the play begins.
Like her mum (played by Liz White), Racheal, whom we first meet as a garrulous 10-year-old, wants more than anything to escape, and the urge can make her behave rather nastily.

But as given exhilarating (and willfully irritating) life, from pre-adolescence to young adulthood, by Ms. O’Flynn, this girl is a radiantly divided self, torn between the need for flight and the gravitational pull of Stockport. She can’t stop moving or talking, mostly in a fusilla! de of que! stions that have little chance of being answered.

Some critics have seen this play, which was first staged in Manchester in 2002, as a life-affirming work. I don’t know about that. “Port” left me feeling that Racheal might well be buried in Stockport. On the other hand, I could also imagine the words “I’ve gotta get outta here” carved on her tombstone, and their summoning an oddly hopeful energy from beyond the grave.