If you really feel that you have to write a sequel to a play of Shakespeare’s, intending your production to be an unsubtle allegory for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, then you may as well take Macbeth as your starting point. Pre-modern (and, let’s be honest, even relatively modern) Scotland’s raw barbarism bore plenty of similarity to the tribal realities of contemporary Mesopotamia and Central Asia, and though the Scots accept the fact of their recent backwardness—they are even weirdly proud of it—there has always been some resentment at the fact that the most famous exposition of the Scottish dark ages was written by an Englishman.
The sequel, Dunsinane, by Scottish playwright David Greig, is currently running at the Shakespeare Theatre’s Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, D.C. Greig is altogether more sympathetic to the moral dilemmas faced by his countrymen than was Shakespeare, who—however richly—painted Macbeth, and certainly his wife, as villains and cold-blooded murderers driven by a lust for power.
Greig, in the fine tradition of the senachies—the old clan poets of the Highlands and Islands—takes a more complicated view. "While perhaps difficult to excuse morally the old Highland practice of setting light to a church with the congregation inside was something that any competent senachie would with a little thought be able to justify on military, political, or even theological grounds," my distant kinsman Sir Fitzroy Maclean once wrote of this poetic tradition.
Lady Macbeth, we learn early in Dunsinane, in fact survived the collapse of her husband’s rule portrayed in the Shakespearean original. Now named Gruach, and played with an alien charm by Siobhan Redmond, she is driven less by evil ambition and more by rational self-interest and a sense of her family’s honor. She plays the insurgent foil to the occupier Siward (Darrell D’Silva), the English commander whose army has killed Macbeth and placed a new king, Malcolm (Ewan Donald), on the throne.
The political sympathies of the play are clear, but theatregoers hoping for a good, straightforward neocon bashing and a polemic on behalf of the postcolonial Other will be disappointed. Greig's vision is liberal, not radical. Siward’s intentions, if not his political skills, are presented in a generous light; the English soldiers are boys, not monsters; and the Scots themselves are shown to be perfectly capable of atrocity.
Unfortunately, this narrative balance, in concert with the substantial talents of the cast, does not actually produce a particularly rich story. The "ripped from the headlines" quality of the plot might please some, but the frequent moments of dramatic irony are about as subtle as a Rodney Dangerfield joke, missing only the rim shot.
One crude allusion after another is forced upon the audience: during the initial invasion, the English soldiers are surprised by the suicidal tactics of defeated, dead-ender Scottish fighters; Siward can’t understand the complex relationships of the Scottish clans, seems capable of speaking only in platitudes about "a new kind of war," and notes, for guffaws from the house, that the English are going to have to be in Scotland "a little longer than we planned"; a young boy is tortured and his written confession appears on stage, ostentatiously soaked in blood; an English soldier’s letters home betray evidence of increasing PTSD; at one point, the Scottish women appear to ululate at the thrill of witnessing an insurgent attack.
This sort of thing can be clever, but rarely wise. By definition it can’t be lasting—it’s theater as journalism, the play as a blog post. This is a shame, because Greig and the company executing his play offer abundant evidence of excellence. Ewan Donald’s Malcolm-as-Karzai is slick and funny and subtle, Greig’s own humor is consistently effective (perhaps too much so—he is too often tempted to step on his own dramatic moments with a punch line), and, in an era where audiences have cheap access to multimillion dollar visual effects at the movies, the eerie snowstorm in the final scene manages to produce a dramatic and emotional effect.
But the play clearly aims at wisdom. And if by "wisdom" we mean "the banal exposition of conventional opinion," then it is very wise indeed. War is always ironic. Violence is a consequence of cultural misunderstanding. Heroes and villains are totally relative categories—one man’s Butcher of Baghdad is another’s savior of his tribe. The waves of this preachy, predictable stuff more than threaten to drown the few decent critiques of the West’s late policies that the play succeeds in making—as when Malcolm chides Siward for being too quick to assume that peace is the natural state of things for man—not to mention deeper meditations that go beyond policy.
None of which is to say that the play isn’t revealing, a well-performed and thoughtfully crafted artifact of the strange and self-doubting elite that attends its performances. The sinister Lady Macbeth’s reinvention as the rational and proud and (of necessity) double-crossing Gruath is perhaps the clearest illustration of the fact that a talented playwright working today, striving to be honest, prefers not to portray the world as having any real villains in it. Even Siward won’t serve. He becomes rather villainous for much of the second act, transforming (a touch implausibly, we have to observe) from a softy humanitarian to a carpet-chewing, child-quartering madman over the course of the intermission. But even then, his actions are the pathetic consequence of his frustration and incompetence and grief—not his selfishness, say, or his ambition.
Dunsinane makes virtues of amorality and moral equivalence, an approach that seems to please theatergoers in Washington. Meanwhile, American Sniper is on track to have the biggest domestic box office of any movie released in 2014.