Macbeth (20 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Roman Polanski’s 1971 film with the young Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as the Macbeths was shot in bright technicolor, with much gore, especially in the scene where Macduff’s family are slaughtered in their home. It did not go unremarked that Polanski had begun work on the film shortly after his heavily pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, together with three of her friends, was brutally murdered by followers of Charles Manson. The film, financed by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy company, was also controversial for Lady Macbeth’s nudity in her sleepwalking scene and for its ending, which lacks textual warrant, wherein Donalbain goes to the weyard sisters, as if to initiate a further cycle of ambition and violence.
Akiro Kurosawa’s film adaptation
Throne of Blood
(1957), a translation of the plot and setting into Samurai culture, shot in expressionistic black and white, is generally acclaimed as a classic of Japanese cinema. It has been highly influential on western cinema from the
Seven Samurai
remake (
The Magnificent Seven
) onward. A number of stage productions have been filmed, including Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed 1971 production for the RSC at The Other Place with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, and Gregory Doran’s at the Swan with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter.
Stones Have Been Known to Move and Trees to Speak
Images of blood and darkness dominate the language of Shakespeare’s shortest and most exciting tragedy. Fair is foul and foul is fair—from the instant we are plunged into the Scottish play there is a sense of stagnancy, of something rotting and eating away at all the natural and pure things of this world. Witches, vile murder, ghosts, apparitions, and nightmares punctuate the action of the protagonist’s story. Is it any surprise that this play has been the inspiration
for so much Gothic and horror fiction, and that Roman Polanski’s film version is listed in publications and websites that deal with the greatest British horror films of the twentieth century?
Despite the play’s historical background and its obvious references to the political world of the time, it is the psychological complexities of the Macbeths, the disintegration of the mind, and the usurpation of good by evil, which have proved the focal point for most modern productions. In a world dominated by the lust for power, Shakespeare gives us a case study of how simply and quickly the evil in man can spread like a virus. How can a person commit or order acts that by their nature deny any human feeling? As critic Stanley Wells points out: “The play’s framework of national destiny has proved less attractive to later ages than the personal tragedy of Macbeth played within it; many modern productions adjust the text to throw even more emphasis on Macbeth and his Lady.”
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Peter Hall’s 1967 production focused on the powerful degree to which
Macbeth
is a Christian play. He was led by the religious symbolism in such lines as:
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o’th’building.
The murder of the king is seen as a sacrilegious act, and with it “nature seems dead.” In Hall’s opening scene, the weyard sisters were shown as huge silhouettes inverting a crucifix on which they poured blood; a cross was carried behind Duncan and, later, behind Malcolm; Duncan wore the white robes of consecrated kingship, and when later Macbeth appeared in the same robes, “the blasphemy was shocking.” The religious reading was carried through to the set, which “consisted of a dark, oak interior which looked like a cathedral.”
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Before the dialogue began, there was
a quite sensational statement of purity, virtue, innocence, snatched away to show the evil lying beneath. A great white sheet—an angel’s wing?—hung over the stage and, just before
the appearance of the witches, fluttered away, flapping into extinction. Its disappearance revealed a blood-red carpet like a heath with clotted heather. One felt that if one pressed one’s hand in it blood would ooze out. It was backed by red granite-seeming cliffs and, at times during the action, sections of it were removed to show an arid bone-white expanse—as if it rested on a bleached skeleton. The witches seemed to emerge from beneath this bloody carpet, bearing an inverted crucifix …
Macbeth
for [Hall] was the ‘metaphysics of evil.’
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To focus on this religious aspect of the play does help to overcome one of the main stumbling blocks for a production of
Macbeth
: its representation of the supernatural, the need to make a modern secular audience accept a world in which witches, ghosts, and apparitions are powerful forces.
In 1982, by contrast, Howard Davies took religion out of the play and deliberately set out a “policy of demystification.”
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His production
completely jettisoned the atmosphere of blood and darkness in which so many Macbeths have floundered. Instead, he used a direct, clinical style which made no attempt to conceal its theatrical devices. The stage was dominated by two percussionists and their battery of equipment, brilliantly spotlit on an upper level, who punctuated and commented on the action, rather than providing atmosphere.
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In his depiction of the supernatural there was an “abandonment of any attempt to impersonate the witches as bearded, skinny-lipped hags, withered and wild in their attire”:
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The weird sisters were attractive young actresses who performed routines with whirling blankets, and who deliberately fragmented their speeches into ‘imperfect’ word-games, meaningless until meaning was given to them by Macbeth’s response … The apparitions were spoken clearly and directly by the watching company, with no attempt at theatrical illusion, and Birnam Wood was merely a forest of drawn swords.
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4. Peter Hall production, Stratford 1967: the Macbeths crowned. Sharp contrasts of darkness and light on the set emphasize a reading in terms of primal good and evil.
Although heavily criticized by some, this production’s staging choices were praised by many for the way in which the audience were forced to look at the play afresh. The absence of a sense of primordial evil was perhaps a reaction against, or at least an alternative to, the viewpoint presented by the groundbreaking Trevor Nunn production of 1976. By paring the play down to its essentials, Nunn created a palpable intensity and brooding sense of evil, which never let up. A circle painted on the floor of The Other Place studio theater encompassed the action of the play. Used as the main acting space, it symbolized a magic circle in which magicians stood for protection while conjuring and in which the evil of Macbeth would be exorcised. It also represented the “golden round,” the religious and ceremonial aspects of kinship.
Trevor Nunn used the opening scene to illustrate the powerful sense apparent throughout the play of the forces of evil ranged against goodness. While Duncan and his court were at prayer, the three witches moved to the centre of the acting circle and
began to groan and howl. Their voices became louder, until they drowned out the pious Duncan.
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Surrounded by darkness and with the absence of a formal raised stage, the actors performed on a bare floor.
The audience—less than two hundred of them—sat on three sides of the acting area, two rows deep and elevated above the floor by scaffolding … The acting area was defined by a black painted circle round which the actors sat on packing-crates when not engaged in the performance. The audience could thereby see the witches outside the circle as they watched Macbeth fulfilling their prophecies, and see Macduff sitting ignorantly as his family is slaughtered … The cast was reduced to fourteen (about the number used when
Macbeth
was first performed) and there was some doubling. The audience … were so close to the actors that an extraordinary intimacy was created between them, and the words could be spoken quietly and subtly … the play was not so much about damnation as about the minds of the characters … In such plain, austere surrounding, the success of the production rested entirely on the actors.
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The success of the sparse setting of this production led other directors to reflect the psychological interior of their Macbeths in the set design. Discarding the attempt to recreate any recognizable interior, designers have sought to achieve a similar intimacy and intensity on the main Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage. Jonathan Pryce, who played Macbeth in 1986, said: “I don’t see this play set at some particular point where it would have immediate relevance to any particular society. It has resonances throughout time. When a play offers an overview of the human psyche, it seems too narrow to confine it.”
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In the production played by Pryce, directed by Adrian Noble, Bob Crowley’s set “was an illusionist’s box where any number of conjuror’s tricks might defeat the eye. Doors suddenly appeared, stairs shot out of flush walls. Then the walls themselves began to move.
The Macbeths’ world got smaller and smaller until it felt like a coffin.”
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The set was variously described as a “claustrophobic pressure chamber”
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and an empty box with “a recessed platform surrounded by blank timber walls. It can be anywhere: a heath, the castle, the interior of the hero’s skull.”
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In 1993, Derek Jacobi starred as Macbeth and director Adrian Noble, returning to the play for a second time, made the lead performance the focus of the whole production. Designer Ian MacNeil explained:
Derek is brilliant at taking you right inside someone’s head and exploring their deepest thoughts and emotions. I think that set helps us to do that. Its dark, interior quality allows the production to focus upon what is private and metaphysical in the central character. Basically the set is a black box … when colour is introduced it has far greater impact. Lady Macbeth’s first entrance in a crimson dress, the sumptuous banquet to greet Duncan’s arrival at Dunsinane, the dripping blood on the hands of Macbeth and his wife, the Witches’ supernatural pageant, the verdant colours of the scene in England, stand out strikingly amidst the production’s brooding darkness.
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MacNeil designed a moving bridge that spanned the whole stage and became the site for all the play’s magical elements. Piers Ibbotson, the assistant director, described the concept: “the bridge provides a physical manifestation of the play’s hierarchy—it shows the witches, and later Banquo’s ghost, hovering over the affairs of men.”
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Considered by many to be a chamber piece,
Macbeth
appears to work better on a more intimate stage. In 1999, Gregory Doran staged the play in the Swan Theatre, a Jacobean-style playhouse built in 1986, which seats around four hundred people. This production was widely considered the best staging by the RSC since Trevor Nunn’s 1976 production at The Other Place, a small black-box studio with an even smaller capacity. In contrast to so many other productions, Doran and his designer set the play in a very recognizable modern world: that of Eastern European conflict.
Doran’s spare staging is played without interval and hurtles along at tremendous, stomach-lurching speed. It’s also performed in modern dress, and in its catalogue of horrors inevitably recalls the murderous strife in former Yugoslavia. Doran never labours specific parallels, however, creating instead an almost hallucinatory impression of the brutality and horror that burns itself into the brain with the intensity of a bad dream … the tension is constantly increased by Adrian Lee’s deeply unsettling percussive score … Almost all the action is set in either half light or murky darkness … There are shadows everywhere.
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Everything is on the move: uncertain, equivocal. The opening words—the witches’ curses—are spoken in darkness. What look like sturdy walls go bendy, as apparitions bulge out of them. When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane it does so in such a crepuscular swirl that for a moment it really does appear as an eerie event.
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The program notes were written by journalist and broadcaster Fergal Keane, whose experience of reporting from the battlefields gave a unique insight into Macbeth’s relevance at the end of the twentieth century:
My life … has been a journey through the heartland of the warlords: from Belfast to Pretoria, from Sarajevo to Kosovo, Rwanda to Cambodia, I have met them—the men and women in whom ‘vaulting ambition o’erleaps itself’ and any greater moral purpose or instinct for humanity. It has been suggested—with grievous lack of insight—that
Macbeth
is not a play relevant to our times. The truth is that I can hardly imagine a drama more relevant in this age of bloody coups and civil wars. In this year alone a once-trusted general has seized power in Pakistan; in Africa the lords of the gun have been busy turning Congo into a wasteland; in East Timor the warriors of General Wiranto’s Special Forces spent months killing their enemies in advance of the referendum for independence.
Macbeth
irrelevant? Never.
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