Cauldron

 

Jericho Arts Centre until May 14, 2022
Tickets from $27 at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cauldron-tickets

Posted May 7, 2022

If you think all the ways of spinning the Scottish play have been exhausted, you need to check out Vital Spark’s production of Cauldron at the Jericho Arts Centre. Playwright Barbara Ellison, who also directs, takes the tale and turns it ass-over-tea-kettle.

Those weird sisters? Apparitions? In Ellison’s take on Macbeth they are simply an old crone and her two beautiful daughters who are out foraging in the royal forest when they are surprised by Macbeth (Gordon Law) and his sidekick Banquo (Matt Loop). Scared witless, the mother, Morag Macdonald, (Joan Bryans) admits later, “I had to say something” and so she intoned, as if an incantation, “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!”, the line that in both Cauldron and the Shakespeare version sets the tragedy in motion.

Furthermore, no fan of King Duncan – “a vain and foolish old man who thinks everyone loves him” – it’s Morag, with a very old bone to pick with the king, who puts the bee in the bonnet of Lady Macbeth (Rebecca Walters). Murder?  Why not? “They [the men] murder each other all the time,” says Lady M.

In the second meeting with Macbeth, Morag and her daughters Bessie (Allyce Kranabetter) and Maggie (Sarah Prato) dig themselves even deeper with what Morag later calls, “all that rubbish we made up” – that rubbish being “of no woman born” and “til Birnam wood/Do come to Dunsinane”.

As in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, there’s lots of blood and treachery but with lots of twists and turns and always with Morag at the centre. She regrets the collateral damage – the killing of the king’s two guards, the assassination of Banquo and the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and children but the tragedy, like a stream finding its way to the ocean, is unstoppable.

In Morag, playwright Ellison has crafted a fascinating character; smart, a bit bawdy (‘You were always ruled by your nether regions”, she accuses King Duncan), irreligious (“I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit or the other two – the Father and Son”, she tells the Abbess, who surprises her by replying, “Neither do I”), wise in the way of the world and very wry.

Macbeth as a comedy? No, just leavened with humour to offset all that bleakness.

Bryans, portraying Morag, has never lost her Scottish accent even after years of living in Canada; she’s perfect for the part. The right attitude, the right age, the right everything; she must have been thrilled when Cauldron came along. While you’d not see Bryans waving the feminist flag, Vital Spark Theatre, the theatre company she founded in 2002, is well known for uncovering ‘unheard’ or ‘forgotten’ women in history. This time around, the woman at the centre springs from the imagination of the playwright.

At a dozen, it’s a large cast including the playwright as the Abbess; the accents come and go and there’s a variety of experience on the Jericho Arts Centre stage. Especially sweet are Kranabetter and Prato as Morag’s “girls” and a solid effort is made by Law to take on the iconic role of Macbeth. He does, after all, join the ranks of English theatre’s finest actors when delivering, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Law gives it his best shot. Rebecca Walters, a United Players mainstay, is – as always – credible and committed as power-hungry Lady Macbeth.

Set design by Chris Bayne is spare but functional; costume design by Catherine E. Carr borrows and blends to make the most of a small budget. Lighting by Amelia Wagenaar and sound design by Roger Monk and Joshua Osborne add appreciably to this not-yet-professional theatre company production.

But more than the production, the play’s the thing: an interesting take on an old story that takes Macbeth out of the driver’s seat and puts an old woman behind the wheel. Don’t expect her to be wise and charming. She’s wise alright but more conniving than charming. You’ve got to love her chutzpah.