Macbeth (21 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
The huge problem for players of Macbeth is to yoke together those warring opposites of sensitivity and violence, deep depression and coarse brutality. Some Macbeths have shot their bolts by the end of the banquet scene; others save themselves for that fifth act which awaits like the north face of the Eiger.
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On explaining the psychological difficulties of soldiers returning from the First World War, the president of the British Psycho-Analytic Association, Ernest Jones, explained that war constituted “an official abrogation of civilized standards” in which men were not only allowed, but encouraged “to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is throughout abhorrent to the civilized mind … All sorts of previously forbidden and hidden impulses, cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater activity.”
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When we, and the weyard sisters, meet Macbeth, he is halfway between the battlefield and home, physically and psychologically unsettled, between two worlds. The sisters’ prophecy has such a startling effect not only because of the regicidal thought that it implants, but also because Macbeth knows what will happen if his psychology of war becomes his domestic psychology, unleashing those “forbidden and hidden impulses” without the constraints normally imposed by the pressures of social conformity. He knows, exceptional warrior that he is, that to cross this barrier will have diabolical consequences.
In 1986, Jonathan Pryce played Macbeth as a psychotic waiting to happen, as a “killing machine with an elegant turn of phrase.”
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The exemplary soldier, used to obeying orders, his Macbeth was initially passive: “To do anything he needs to be given an order. Hitherto he has obeyed his king. Now he receives orders from elsewhere; they happen to express his secret ambition.”
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His descent from dutiful soldier to a “demon of nervous energy”
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was the centerpiece of the production. The appalling change in Macbeth’s character had a powerful and frightening effect. Sinead Cusack, who played Lady Macbeth, pointed out that “she has no knowledge of the hell that she’s letting loose in his mind and his life, and what he will
become.”
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Whereas most Macbeths in performance try to quickly adopt a mask to conceal their true feeling about the prophecy, Pryce’s fainted at the news. His extreme reaction perhaps indicated that he had not just thought about being king, but had already thought about
killing
the king.
Pryce’s performance is a remarkable example of thinking the character through from scratch. He presents us with a boisterous soldier long tormented by ‘wicked dreams’ but dogged by personal insecurity; and after the murder, he remains recognisably the same person.
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For a good third of the action he maintains a mask of ingratiation—excessively modest, ready with winning smiles … Even when the mask cracks it is only by degrees, and it is not until the climax of the banquet—which he diversifies with burlesque displays of lunacy to put the guests off the scent—that the monster finally hatches out. He takes his wife’s hand for the speech on ‘night’s black agents’ and finishes it with a blood-curdling shriek that sends her staggering across the stage; then bursts into laughter at his little joke.
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Sinead Cusack described how immediately after this Pryce showed the disintegration of his character’s mind and the Macbeths’ relationship:
And then he smeared all my lipstick across my face. He put his hand in my mouth and yanked down my jaw, mocking a kiss. It was a travesty of the embrace, of how it used to be. He was throwing their sexuality back in her face, saying, ‘That no longer has power in my life,’ scoffing at her with that bark of a laugh. His mania was staggeringly dangerous and she was terrified … And deeply hurt. Lost … He was completely gone from me and he would never come back. It was a feeling of absolute hopelessness.
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In contrast to Pryce, in 1993 Derek Jacobi, an actor known for playing more sensitive characters, brought out the emotional complexity of Macbeth. He focused on Macbeth’s psychological journey, reclaiming him as tragic hero. Of Jacobi’s suitability to the role, director Adrian Noble commented:
5. Jonathan Pryce as Macbeth with the “apparition” of a child king conjured up in Act 4 Scene 1: “He has no children”—unlike Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, and Siward. Directed by Adrian Noble, 1986.
I think he’s a natural Macbeth but not a natural psychopath. The idea of the man being a psychopath has overlain our perception of the part. If you take the psychopath out of it, the play is a metaphysical debate about what is and what is not. His escalating hallucinations are a metaphor in themselves. It takes in scenes explored in
Lear
and
Hamlet
about madness, the fear of losing control. It’s also the best exposition of tyranny and its methods ever written.
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Jacobi thoroughly examined Macbeth’s decline into evil by tracing the disintegration of his civilian and domestic side, and the usurpation of the better part of himself by the killer instincts that dominate him on the battlefield:
Macbeth didn’t seem to me, at the start, to know more of evil than any other soldier of his time who is used to killing people. What caught my imagination was the effect of evil on him, the changes it brings about. We spent a certain amount of time in rehearsal thinking about what is frightening, what is palpably evil, what is out there; the forces that seem to lurk malevolently around the world of the play. This was an area we tried to work hard on, with as much psychological depth as possible … ‘So foul and fair a day’ does not, it seems to me, refer to the weather: ‘foul’ is about those heads he’s cut off and bowels he’s ripped out; ‘fair’ is because it was all worth it, for this great victory. That is the state of mind he is in, as, just by chance he repeats the phrase that the witches have used … Because of the victory he is in a state of high excitement and of emotional exhaustion. He has been killing all day: he is covered with blood. In this state he gets the news: in this state he must react to it. The speed with which things happen in the next phase of the play is to a large extent conditioned by Macbeth’s physical and mental state when he receives the
witches’ greeting … We wanted to present a couple much in love and comfortable with each other. We also wanted to show the contrast between Macbeth the warrior, whose duty is killing and maiming, and Macbeth the husband, the lover, the domestic, cultured man who dances and listens to music. Off the battlefield he isn’t in the least gruff or brutal in his behaviour … His first words are ‘My dearest love,’ a very romantic phrase, which he doesn’t use again—his language to his wife becomes, indeed, progressively less endearing.
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(The last point is questionable: the Macbeths are not seen onstage together after the third act, during which Macbeth is still calling his wife by the tender endearment “dearest chuck.”) According to critic Irving Wardle:
Jacobi’s open-hearted soldier is also a machiavellian actor (leading the applause for Malcolm’s election); his increasing hardness is matched by his increasing vulnerability (as late as the cauldron scene you find him nuzzling for comfort into a passing messenger); and finally this clapped-out warlord regains all his original valor in the fight with Macduff. What Jacobi achieves, thanks largely to his evocation of inner horrors reinforced by a style of delivery that charges iambic lines with sprung rhythm, is to reclaim Macbeth as a hero. Attention always focuses on him; what happens to him matters more than what happens to anyone else; even when organising the massacre of Macduff’s family he retains his personal charm. The man who cancels his bond with humanity still commands the sympathy of a morally indefensible reading.
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Jacobi also picked up on the fearfulness of Macbeth, his constant awareness that he is slipping into evil:
I went through the play marking the times he speaks of fear, particularly in relation to himself. He does so in every scene: it is paramount for him, the man is constantly fearful … The moment before he does the murder he is afraid—the dagger
speech is a fearful speech, the utterance of a terrified man. He does the murder for her, and it destroys them both.
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“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!”: fear exists because the better part of himself is constantly resisting, fighting and at odds with his actions. When he invokes “pity, like a naked new-born babe,” this battle within Macbeth becomes wedded to the language:
His head is full of the mixture of good and evil. At this moment the evil side of him, which we all possess, is getting the upper hand and in order to balance it he brings up the best, the purest, the most innocent images, of angels, and new-born babies, and the sky. They are all pure, unsullied, wonderful images; goodness pours out of them; they’re shining. And on the other side are the dark, blood-driven, evil, dank thoughts.
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In order to remain sane, Jacobi’s Macbeth cut off the emotional side of his life, something that Lady Macbeth could not do, no matter how she willed it. Having given the order to murder Lady Macduff and her children, this Macbeth went to inspect the aftermath. “That is the true monstrousness; it is that appalling lack of emotion that he has to come to terms with in the end.”
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The difficulty for any actress playing Lady Macbeth is the speed with which she is thrown into delivering her most important speeches. There is no buildup, no backstory: from the moment we see her, the actress has to perfect the equivalent of a vertical take-off. From her arresting opening speech to her final madness, Lady Macbeth has a psychological arc which has to be mapped in very few scenes.
Judi Dench played her as a woman obsessed with ambition:
Slinky costumes were replaced by a drab, black outfit which effectively concealed hair and figure, leaving only hands and mobile features visible … As she knelt in hoarse prayer to the
spirits, her demand to be filled with ‘direst cruelty’ suddenly appalled her. She broke away with an animal squeal of terror, hands over her eyes, as if she had come face to face with the fiend. She had no illusions about the evil she was embracing, but the thrill of it drew her back. As she reached a final, frantic ecstasy, arms outstretched to embrace the darkness, they were ready to receive her husband on his unexpected arrival.
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The power of the supernatural was palpable in this intense studio production, and Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy came across as an incantation, a spell. On her words “Hie thee hither,” Macbeth, as if magically summoned, appeared onstage.
When discussing their conception of the part, most modern actresses pick up on the idea that the Macbeths have lost a child, and build this into their performance. This angle was heavily emphasized in Adrian Noble’s 1986 production, which
treated the Macbeths—Jonathan Pryce and Sinead Cusack—as a childless Strindbergian couple for whom power became a substitute for parenthood. When Lady M taunted her husband with cowardice, he slapped her on the face … the couple went on to clasp each other with fierce protectiveness when she mentioned the loss of their child: you felt you were watching an intimate domestic drama with immense political repercussions.
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Supplanting and subverting the social isolation, feelings of longing, depression, loneliness, and utter desolation that can afflict parents who desperately want a child, these Macbeths put their energies into a twisted form of conception:
As rehearsals progressed, it was this bleak biological datum—’He hath no children’—that began to focus the tragedy.
Macbeth
became not so much a political tragedy of multiple betrayal as a domestic drama, the destruction of a marriage. Lacking children, the Macbeths’ energies re-directed themselves into obsessions that travestied creativity: they killed
other people’s children, turning their kingdom into a wasteland. But when they discovered what it meant to hold a barren sceptre, their childlessness doubly mocked them. There could be no success without succession … This Macbeth liked having children around. He liked children’s games. The witches’ apparitions were children, seductive in white nightgowns, playing blind man’s buff with the kneeling king on the floor, giggling their predictions into his ear, then circling him in an endless procession of Banquo’s future issue. These same white-gowned children then became Macduff’s ambushed family. One of them sat on the floor playing with the assassin’s bootstraps before he was picked up and stabbed … such images found a contemporary expression for the evil that the play is exploring. The abuse of children is the ultimate taboo, the death of a child is the ultimate grief.
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Lady Macbeth sacrifices her womanhood to these “murdering ministers.” She unsexes herself, suppressing femininity as she seeks to dry up the “milk of human kindness” in both herself and her husband. Her punishment is to be locked in her crime forever, with suicide the only escape. She lives in a constant state of night—neither awake nor asleep, somewhere between life and death (somnambulism was once thought to be the result of demonic possession). In 1986, Sinead Cusack’s Lady Macbeth built into the character a physical repulsion, a psychological nausea, prompted by the sight of Duncan’s blood: