Laughter unbecoming

The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic operations would soon realise. There is the obsession with cardboard boxes — in the Ring the end of the world consisted of piles of them collapsing; here, instead of Banquo’s ghost, we get a box with a smiley painted on it, jerking on to the stage and frightening Macbeth, as it would. When the curtain falls on that scene, a curtain is lowered inscribed with a much larger smiley. The opening scene of the work, after a prelude whose first bit is mimed to, obscurely, the curtain rises on three caravans, modern style, out of which the witches pop, before other witches push up the blinds and lean out to sing. Macbeth and Banquo arrive in kilts, which all the males wear, most of them with tammies, long socks and boots; the chorus seem to have been chosen for their bandy legs.

The Macbeths’ castle is a castellated brick affair, with a wooden hutch on one side, which is where they entertain Duncan — he really should be suspicious of such hospitality. When Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter, she pulls up a conveniently loose floorboard and gets out an axe. She’s wearing, as throughout, a blue business suit. She owns a very large washing machine, which we see as soon as the curtain rises on the Sleepwalking scene — cue for more guffaws. Poor Duncan hobbles across the stage to the accompaniment of Verdi’s stunningly banal little march, wearing a crown far too big for him, the very image of insignificance.