Quid Pro Banquo

The critic’s toughest moment comes when he or she must recognize something innovative and mesmerizing without personally liking it. It’s not dissimilar from being the defense counsel for a serial killer who, deep in your gut, you know is cold-blooded, remorseless, completely beyond rehabilitation and deserving of the harshest sentence. You compartmentalize. You cleave the personal from the professional. You psych yourself into whatever stance gets the job done.

That’s where I am regarding Macbeth, the Rupert Goold-directed Chichester Festival Theatre production now ensconced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a 41-performance run. It stars a mustachioed, humanistic, spellbindingly vulnerable Patrick Stewart as the grim Thane of Cawdor. He is a man wracked with ambition relatively late in life, inspired and then compelled into doings of evil by Kate Fleetwood’s sexy, bloodthirsty tigress of a Lady Macbeth.

There are times when Goold’s production is like a supernova of high concepts and theatrical bedazzlements. Transforming the three witches into nurses, for example, elicited gasps from the audience, although anyone with the most cursory knowledge of Macbeth couldn’t have been that surprised. At the same time, one could argue that having the witches deliver Shakespearean verse as thuggish raps may be too clever for its own good.

Still, Goold is on to something, setting the play in a totalitarian Stalinist state at the height of the Cold War, mostly in and around an industrial kitchen. From the mimed ladling out of soup to the pouring of wine, from the emergence of an oversized chocolate cake to Stewart meticulously preparing and wolfing down a sandwich, this is the most indulgently epicurean Scottish play we’re likely to see.

Designed by Anthony Ward, this chillingly sterile, white-tiled room additionally serves as the wing of a hospital, a surreal mortuary and the banquet hall for the ghost of slain Banquo (Martin Turner) to haunt Macbeth in the production’s supreme masterstroke of staging.

Yet between Lorna Heavey’s video and projection design (was that footage of Soviet troops?), two production numbers (was that the Soviet national anthem?) and all that gastronomic goodness, Goold has fattened Macbeth, the shortest Shakespeare tragedy, to three hours. At the same time, he has given the notion of storytelling a gastric bypass. If you don’t come to this Macbeth well versed in the relationship between Macbeth and Duncan (Paul Shelley), the murdered Scottish king—or Macbeth and Duncan’s sons Malcolm (Scott Handy) and Donalbain (Ben Carpenter), who flee in fear following their father’s murder; or Macbeth and Banquo’s son Fleance (Emmett White)—I’m unsure you’ll understand them by the end of the play. Fortunately, Stewart grounds this Macbeth whenever one of Goold’s eye-popping scenes threatens to catapult everything into the conceptual stratosphere. Stewart’s Macbeth is so shaken by the ghosts he sees, so humbled by the conscience that gnaws at him, that when he is confronted with his dead wife near the end of the play, his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech tumbles forth with bilious self-ridicule.

So yes, this Macbeth is innovative and mesmerizing. Yet I admired it more than it moved me; it tickled my brain far more than it touched my heart. As the Brits already know Stewart as a superb Shakespearean actor (he spent 22 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company before he became known to us Yanks as Jean-Luc Picard), and as I fondly recall his Prospero from The Tempest here in 1995, I eagerly await more of his Bard stateside soon. Just not this Macbeth—and not today or tomorrow. Maybe the day after?

Through March 22. BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., B’klyn. 718-636-4182. $30-$90 [SOLD OUT].