Macbeth (19 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Nineteenth-century actors generally humanized Lady Macbeth, making her feminine and womanly, a good wife, if somewhat misguided. Adelaide Ristori, though, domineered over Tesibaldo Vitaliani’s Macbeth in an Italian production at the Lyceum in 1857, which successfully toured Europe and the United States. Edwin Booth played the role successfully in New York in numerous productions
with Charlotte Cushman, and also with the Polish-born Helena Modjeska, who, like Helen Faucit, emphasized Lady Macbeth’s femininity.
Henry Irving’s productions at the Lyceum were spectacular and enormously successful. His dark costumes and subdued lighting for
Macbeth
“blended together to compose a dark, massive, dangerous world.”
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However, his reading of Macbeth as “a bloody-minded hypocritical villain”
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failed to convince all the critics:
A Macbeth less luxurious than is now seen cannot be readily conceived. Yet the word is apt, and furnishes a clear indication of the character. Against the over-intellectuality of Macbeth the imaginative power and the marvellous mobility of feature of the actor cannot prevail. The ingenuity, subtlety, picturesqueness, and power of the performance may be granted, but the new Macbeth will not replace the old.
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It is clear from the notes that Ellen Terry, Irving’s Lady Macbeth, scribbled in the margins of her working script that she shared the prevailing notions about the nature of women. Lady Macbeth’s tragedy, as Ellen Terry saw it, lay in an essentially feminine ambition, a misplaced and afterward disillusioned faith in a husband devoid of the stuff of kings: “A woman (all over a woman) who believed in Macbeth with a lurking knowledge of his weakness, but who never found him out to be nothing but a brave soldier and a weakling, until that damned party in the parlor—‘The Banquet Scene’ as it is called.”
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Ellen Terry judged it right to keep Mrs. Siddons’s cold determination while discarding the fiendish aspects of her nature that would have so disturbed Victorian beliefs about the nature of women. Many critics could not accept this “enchanting being” as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth:
So exquisite a creature is she as by the flickering firelight she reads her husband’s letter, so radiant in robes of indescribable beauty, and with such rhapsody of passionate longing does she lean back to wait for the coming of her lord, we decline to accept her as other than a being out of Arthurian legend.
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Despite performing his role in Italian in an otherwise English production, the actor Tommaso Salvini’s red-bearded Macbeth combined, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, “pride and the sense of animal well-being” with “moral smallness.” His appearance in the final act suggested how “the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the air of carnage and supped full of horrors.”
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Sarah Bernhardt, meanwhile, played Lady Macbeth in a French prose translation turning the play into “a dull and somewhat vulgar melodrama”
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in which Bernhardt’s histrionic performance was described in the London
Times
as “inadequate and unsatisfactory.”
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The scholarly Johnston Forbes-Robertson, an acclaimed Hamlet, and sophisticated Mrs. Patrick Campbell were miscast as the Macbeths in the Lyceum’s 1898 production. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular production with Violet Vanbrugh as Lady Macbeth was more successful but included fifteen scene changes and lasted over four hours.
Blackwood
’s
Edinburgh Magazine
complained that Beerbohm Tree “has sought to achieve a pictorial, not a dramatic effect.”
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Meanwhile, the reaction against such overblown productions, which started in Germany, was taken up by William Poel, who founded the Elizabethan Stage Society and staged his plays as far as possible as they had been in Shakespeare’s time—on simple thrust stages with minimal scenery and props.
These contrasting production styles continued to compete until Barry Jackson’s 1928 Birmingham Repertory Theatre production, directed by H. J. Ayliff, set the play in the period of the First World War:
The battle scenes with which it opened and closed were brought up to date with exploding shells and rattling machine guns. Macbeth was dressed in khaki uniform with riding-breeches, high, polished boots, and a chest covered in medal ribbons. Lady Macbeth appeared in a short, sleeveless cocktail dress, and Lady Macduff and her son were murdered over a cup of afternoon tea by killers who entered through a casement window.
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2. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, reading the letter from her husband (Lyceum Theatre, London, 1888).
Critics complained that the poetry of the play was lost in the clipped modern delivery, although Laurence Olivier won praise for his performance as Malcolm. For all its faults, the production led the way “to a new understanding of
Macbeth
as a play about alienation in an amoral modern world, whose hero, Kafka-like, finds himself isolated by his visions from those around him, and who discovers that hell is not a place elsewhere but the nightmare within.”
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As critic Michael Mullin goes on to argue, “Jackson’s failed experiment pointed the way and made possible a series of theatrical experiments leading from Komisarjevsky to Guthrie, and finally culminating in Glen Byam Shaw’s tour de force at Stratford-upon-Avon in which Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh gave what theater historians consider a definitive Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.”
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John Gielgud was involved in three productions between 1930 and 1952. The first at the Old Vic was directed by Harcourt Williams. Gielgud’s romantic Macbeth was admired for its intellectual quality and the quality of the verse-speaking. The critic James Agate judged Martita Hunt’s Lady Macbeth, playing opposite Gielgud, to be “too likeable.”
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Gielgud went on to direct the play himself in 1942 at the Piccadilly Theatre, in a performance that, though not to all tastes, the critic Audrey Williamson considered
Poetically … the crowning achievement of our time; his ‘air-borne dagger’ seared the eyeballs, and the imaginative impulse was never wholly lost until it dwindled to the yellow flicker of the ‘brief candle’ and autumn sere. Yet surprisingly our most lyrical actor caught the soldier and murderer too; this was a lithe and virile figure, combining the mud-stained practicability of the warrior with the golden eloquence of the poet: a haunted and haunting performance, with a twilit bitterness at the last.
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Gielgud’s Stratford-upon-Avon production in 1952 with the amiable Ralph Richardson in the title role was less successful. J. C. Trewin
thought that as Lady Macbeth, “Margaret Leighton, at first a tigress burning bright, has the drive, the command that Macbeth lacks.”
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Expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky’s 1933 production at Stratford revolutionized the play with an expressionist design against a background of war. Its experimental quality received mixed reviews, but despite initial reservations, many critics recognized its significance: “It was swift and exciting; intelligently directed to suggest presage of impending doom; and when once we had grasped the producer’s conventions and intentions all, or nearly all, fell into place naturally and inevitably. The old play was given a new cutting-edge.”
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Orson Welles’s 1936 production at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem was equally cutting edge, set in Haiti with an all-black cast, including many nonprofessional actors. It became known as the “Voodoo”
Macbeth
and was noted mainly for its theatrical inventiveness and the violence of its imagery, which tended to overshadow individual performances.
Michael Benthall’s successful production at the Old Vic with Paul Rogers and Ann Todd was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954 to great critical acclaim and afterward toured America, but the production that has come to be regarded as one of the two or three most successful of the twentieth century—along with Trevor Nunn’s Dench/McKellen version, discussed by the director below—was the 1955 production at Stratford with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Glen Byam Shaw’s direction was in fact considered rather ordinary; it was Olivier who made the show, as the London
Times
’s critic records:
The striking thing about the performance is its psychological penetrativeness. It cuts boldly through all sorts of superficial contradictions in the character. The usual difficulty of reconciling the tough warrior with the superstition-ridden neurotic seems scarcely to exist. Attention from first to last is fastened on the mind of Macbeth. Sir Laurence is concerned first to show that his mind is already filled with dangerous thoughts and desires which it dare not formulate till the Weird Sisters give them voice. By various subtleties and ingenuities, each
having the freshness of a new-minted coin, he suggests vividly that the latent nobility of character may yet assert itself against the fatal lure of ambition, but once this hope has gone and dreadful desires have turned to deed the actor treats the deed as a mere incident making possible the psychological drama which follows.
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Macbeth
’s cultural legacy is pervasive due to the relative simplicity of the plot and its archetypal nature, the rise and fall of an ambitious leader, as well as its powerful characterization, especially of Lady Macbeth. It has been frequently adapted into other media—opera, novels, film, television, science fiction, and song—and employed for a variety of purposes from political cartoons and satire to advertising. As Irena Makaryk suggests in her discussion of Ukrainian director Les Kurbas’s 1924 modernistic, anti-bourgeois production, “Within the general trend of modernizing Shakespeare in the West from the 1960s on,
Macbeth
has been the ‘trademark’ avant-garde play, its primitivism and anarchism being particularly attractive characteristics.”
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Verdi’s
Macbeth
was his first adaptation of a Shakespeare play and its brilliance was instantly recognized. First performed at the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, in March 1847, it was revised by Verdi in 1865 for the Paris Opéra, with an added ballet sequence. This is the version generally performed today.
As well as the Ukrainian adaptation discussed by Makaryk, there have been productions across Europe, including a Croatian-language version in 1997 directed by Henryk Baranowski. Welcome Msomi’s South African adaptation
uMabatha
, based on the life of the great Zulu warrior Chaka, was staged at the Globe Theatre in 1997. In 1995, the Australian director Simon Woods produced an experimental bilingual English/Japanese version at the Zen Zen Zo theater in Kyoto. The great Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa has created two distinct productions (one in 1980, the other in 2001, both frequently revived), with Samurai allusions fitting to Macbeth’s military demeanor, and a design based around a cherry tree, its falling blossoms representative of that transience and mortality to which Macbeth alludes in his speech about the turning leaf. At the climax,
cherry blossoms were seen on the branches of Birnam Wood hewn and borne by Malcolm’s army.
3. Laurence Olivier as Macbeth and Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth, directed by Glen Byam Shaw, Stratford-upon-Avon 1955, after the murder on a quasi-realistic stage set characteristic of the period.
There have been numerous film versions, including Orson Welles’s idiosyncratic 1948 movie which, unlike his stage production, was set in Scotland. Welles cut approximately half the text and gave the
play a religious focus, even inventing a new character, the “Holy Father.” Welles himself played Macbeth. Ken Hughes’s black-and-white film
Joe Macbeth
(1955) sets the play in New York’s gangland with simplified dialogue and plot. Cinematography invokes a film noir style, playing with light and shadow, high and low angles.