The Cutprice Guignol

The problem with doing a riff on Macbeth is…well, you’re doing a riff on Macbeth.

This episode, The Understudy, should have been a bit of a ringer for me: I love Macbeth, in that stupid way that you can only love something you glommed on to at fifteen and never got over. I had the Porter’s speech written on the door to my first flat; I react to the first line of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy like I’m hearing the opening chords of All The Small Things at a Blink-182 concert. There is no version of this story, truly, that I can find boring, because Macbeth is inherently a piece that fascinates me – it’s a cliché to call Shakespeare’s work enduring but Macbeth, for me, is the truest example of that, a tale of guilt, obsession, and vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself and falls on th’other-

Yes, well, you get the point. All this to say, that The Understudy is an episode I like, because it’s doing Macbeth, and one that I don’t love, because it’s got Macbeth to live up to. This week’s episode follows Jim (Reece Shearsmith), the understudy to a version of Macbeth played by esteemed thesp Tony (Pemberton), who soon finds himself thrust into the limelight after a series of unfortunate accidents push Tony out of his job.

Where the episode works best, I think, is in the ways it uses the themes of Macbeth to get into a story about ambition within the creative industries, as well as packing the place out with jokes at the expense of every pretentious actor. The show does this kind of arch comedy really well, and it’s clear that Steve Pemberton (who gives good luvvie) is having a lot of fun balancing the charming facade with the nastiness beneath in Tony’s performance.

Basically a bottle episode, the story takes place almost entirely within a single dressing room, and director David Kerr makes great use of the small space to communicate what’s going on with these characters – double reflections across mirrors capturing split motivations, the space made us of to create distance, either physical or emotional. Lyndsey Marshal is a great addition to the cast as the pseudo-Lady-Macbeth (well, for most of the episode’s run, anyway), and not just because I never got over her as Cleopatra in Rome.

I think where The Understudy loses me a bit is where it takes a direct step away from Macbeth in the final act – with the reveal coming that the person orchestrating Jim’s rise to fame isn’t his partner (who has actually committed suicide, in what I would say is a needlessly graphic sequence that I doubt would make the cut now), but an obsessed production assistant. The twist just isn’t that shocking – we thought one person was obsessed enough with Jim’s success to commit a horrible crime, but it turns out it was actually another one. I sort of like it in terms of a Birnam Wood-to-Dunsinane final act fakeout, but it doesn’t feel like a big enough shift in our understanding of the story to really serve as a brilliant final-act twist. I honestly would have preferred if they’d stuck with a more straightforward adaptation of the play.

And that’s probably just because I always want as much Macbeth as I can possibly handle, but hey – these are my reviews, and you come to these for pictures of my cats my scintillating hot takes. I still like the episode, but it suffers from the comparison to such an incredible, iconic piece of storytelling, especially when the twist doesn’t do much to differentiate it. What do you think of The Understudy? Where does it rank for you in this season so far? Let me know in the comments!

(header image via IMDB)