"Unsex me," "take my milk for gall," cries Lady Macbeth, and the man himself urges her to "bring forth man-children only." But that is in Shakespeare’s play, not in the libretto that Verdi largely prepared himself for his opera.
So it’s fair game for director Krysztof Warlinkowski to reverse the murderous couple’s motivation from an ambition that is willing to set aside the gentle mercy of family life to one that arises from their inability to have children, not the other way around.
In the opening scene, the witches that haunt Vladislav Sulimsky’s thane are unreal-looking children in adult masks who disappear through the curtained hospital cubicle where Asmik Grigorian’s Lady M is having the gynaecological examination that will conclude that she cannot have a family.
The lust for glory is there, of course, seen as she later hosts in Hollywood style a banquet for her newly crowned lord that is much about celebrity as about celebration, but while power feeds her mind, it is the denial of motherhood that turns it, and turns the pair into murderers and insanely jealous infanticides.
Children are their constant hallucinations: A doll is served on a platter, Lady Macbeth clutches another one at the start of what is more a deranged ramble rather than a sleepwalk, while those creepy-looking ghost children pass by, and the eight future kings of Macbeth’s tortured imagination are all small figures wearing Banquo masks, one of whom returns to stare at the couple’s final fate.
Grigorian is excellent, singing with unwavering precision, beautifully executing Verdi’s markings for a fil di voce or thin thread of a voice at the end of the mad scene. She is a great actress too, open-mouthed in dumb realisation of the chance ahead when it is announced King Duncan is coming to stay (and to depart sooner than expected) and pressing forward with an icy purposefulness thereafter.
A delicious moment arrives after the couple have poured crocodile tears over the murder of their guest, but left alone, and now, dressed in the full regal rigout, burst into hysterical laughter.
That apart, Macbeth is all nervous desperation to her unswerving calm, hypnotised by terror—and his wife. Sulimsky is not afraid to growl when the occasion arises, but achieves a sort of tragic serenity, now ensconced in a wheelchair, in the lament "Pieta, rispetto, amore".
Jonathan Tetelman and Tareq Nazmi as Macduff and Banco provide first-class support, the latter digging deeply into the emotions as he sings "Ah la paterna mano" while his dead children are laid at his feet.
Walkinkowski’s regular designer Malgorzata Szczesniak sets the piece vaguely in the 1930s, although the style tends toward more modern dress in the later acts, and makes effective use of the huge stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus, including a hospital bench for the opening as long as an NHS waiting list.