She’s been widening his eyes for days now. Fear eats at him. Is his head “full of scorpions”. On the torture rack of thinking, his imagination drives him into a restless madness. From the start, this Macbeth is a psychic. He doesn’t just see the bloodied images of his murdered enemies at the coronation ceremony, but right from the start: This power-hungry ruler is a psychopathic phantom who thinks he’s in danger everywhere. That’s why he twitches and wriggles, grins and whimpers to make it clear to the whole world: someone is endangered here, someone else is here. “What is normal?” calls Kristof Van Boven to the Hamburg premiere audience that evening and means the question deadly seriously.
The scene takes place on a wide, sloping surface. An empty space filled with nothing but bloody imagination. From above, the old master stage designer Katrin Brack lets white paper garlands hang down from time to time – it looks as if someone up there had decreed a festival that nobody down here wants to attend. Instead, people lose themselves in feverish dreams and fearful visions.
This Macbeth is not a murderer. He just makes up his murders. But is that any less bad? What is real and what isn’t? “Nothing is except what isn’t,” he curses. The illness from which this defeated commander suffers is not lust for power, but madness. Dark ideas are raging in his head. They make him scream and whisper. A children’s choir performs. Two dozen little innocent angels, less witches than “weird sisters”, sinister sisters in black and white school uniforms who warn the anti-hero of his future fate. But they also take on the role of the lady, guided by their strict governesses Kate Strong and Angelika Richter. Drive him on, show him off, grab him by his manly honor. But there they reach into the void. Because this Macbeth refuses to follow his family. The way Kristof Van Boven plays him, the way he makes him appear, you have to say, the way he puts him down on this dark, unsupported slant, he doesn’t have a spark of testosterone in his body.
A leper with blood on his hands
A devoured being who would rather close his eyes than open them, hasn’t had any sleep for days and has no sense of the passage of time. Nervous, lost, abandoned. A leper with blood on his hands before he reaches for a knife. Hurt by his own fantasies. Van Boven plays his role with constantly twitching eyelashes, he doesn’t give his Macbeth a second’s break. It is as if he wanted to use this expressive game to drive out all restlessness and attach it to his character. Watching him dash across the stage, crouching, rearing, falling to the ground with a convulsion and exhausting himself in a lurch is a big event.
His voice rises and falls without ever overreacting. It’s not about caricaturing, but about turning inner disgust inside out. “Now I know myself and don’t want to know myself anymore,” he yells and warns. Yes, and then he also murders, this Macbeth, cuts off the head of his closest confidante with a battery-powered cutting machine and packs it in a plastic bag. But compared to his self-destructive spasms, that’s downright comical. This Macbeth does not pose so much a danger to others, above all he is a danger to himself. The whole thing is a gigantic self-portrayal, a lonely coronation festival without guests.