"Stalinist" is the adjective most often employed to describe Rupert Goold's outstanding staging of Macbeth, transfered to Broadway after a smash run at BAM; certainly the sets, projections, and costumes evince that particular mixture of brutalism, militarism, and modernity marking the spot where the 20th century was born in blackest night, slick with blood. But it is Patrick Stewart in the title role who lends this assessment its greatest weight: his ambitious thane-cum-regent seems directly descended from that mercurial tyrant, generating his own catastrophic atmosphere of euphoria, dread, and fatalism - charisma sliding into madness. His Macbeth is not a tragic figure set upon invisible rails of destiny by witchery, but a corrupt opportunist from the start, whose perfunctory doubts about the grisly deed required to assume his predicted perch upon the throne read as little more than self-flattery. The production's signature moment comes when Macbeth communicates to his hatchet men the plan to murder Banquo and his son, Fleance, the precipitous deed that will provoke his eventual downfall: he spends the entire scene calmly and deliberately making a sandwich. The banality of evil, indeed.
