Authors: William Shakespeare
And then she sees the blood … something happens to her gut. For her, the sight is horrible. It shocks her, the reality of it. She has imagined the killing, but people who have visions are often shocked by the reality when it comes … As an actress I tried to show just a little click in my brain that I could store up to use and refer back to later when I had blood on my own hands … After that we began talking different languages. We who had needed to touch each other all the time grew distant. When he had killed, neither of us wanted to touch each other.
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Often portrayed in modern productions as a mutually dependent couple, sexually and mentally intimate in their first scenes, this physical awkwardness immediately after the murder points forward to the disintegration of their relationship. In Adrian Noble’s 1993 production,
After Duncan’s killing, there’s a wonderful moment where you can see the seeds of their future estrangement in the awkwardness of the embrace they try to give one another, their intimacy badly hampered by the fact that both of them have bloody hands. Then this Macbeth begins very pointedly to exclude his wife from his deliberations. Watching them seated at either end of the vast dining table after the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth [Cheryl Campbell] stiffening as she hears of the spy-network he has created, you get a desolate sense of the divergent paths they will now take. The hero progresses to brutalising doggedness … his wife to madness.
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Harriet Walter’s startling and powerful performance in 1999 combined the elements of Lady Macbeth’s character that make her frightening, very human, and ultimately pitiable: “She has a superb cold authority: her analysis of her husband’s scruples is detached rather than scornful. But the self-command isn’t overdone: you can always sense the ordinary mortal behind it, the woman who eventually cracks.”
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Walter cleverly adopted a nervousness to her voice, the kind of throb that only comes when a person tries to be something they are not. There was a real sense of a woman whose potential psychosis had been encouraged by isolation. With no means of support outside of her husband, no network of companions of the kind that develops with the social contact that surrounds children, this Lady Macbeth had had too much time in a world of her own imagining. She came across as Macbeth’s equal, aware of the evil she was invoking but drawn to it as a means of revitalizing their marriage. The reference to the fact that she had “given suck” was met with raw pain by man and wife as they reached toward each other at the painful memory. The ending to the banquet scene had an unusual emotional strength
as it signaled the deteriorating minds and marriage of this once intimate partnership:
At the end of the scene with Banquo’s ghost (here conjured up purely by Sher’s crazed reactions) she subsides into terrible little sobbing laughs with her husband that seem to be torn from her by the roots. It’s like a ghastly parody of their former intimacy.
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Marginalized by power, she also acquires the pathos of internal exile as she is excluded from her husband’s counsel; and the sleepwalking scene, rather than a somnambulistic star turn, becomes a fearful exploration of her disordered sub-conscious.
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Our understanding today of the psychology of war and post-traumatic stress has informed modern productions of
Macbeth
. Many soldiers sensitive to the injustices of war, who have witnessed terrible sights and perpetrated terrible acts, suffer a mental shock that can lead to insomnia, compulsive behavior, visions of violence and the dead coming back to life. The irony for Macbeth is that these disturbances occur not as a consequence of armed combat in the battlefield but as a result of regicide in his own home. Having been “paltered with in a double sense,” he has changed from war hero to dishonorable villain. His acute awareness of this is what makes him continue to be human. By the same account, Lady Macbeth’s mental anguish is intensified to unbearable levels because the feelings of compassion and humanity that she has tried to repress cannot be extinguished. No one who heard it will ever forget the noise, somewhere between an animal whimper and an existential howl, that Judi Dench conjured out of herself in the sleepwalking scene.
Sir Trevor Nunn
is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he
succeeded Peter Hall as Artistic Director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles:
Macbeth
(1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place),
Othello
(1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), and
King Lear
(2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London). The
Macbeth
discussed here is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential productions of the twentieth century and a version of it was filmed.
Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His 1999
Macbeth
, with Sher and Harriet Walter in the leading roles, was highly acclaimed and a version of it was filmed.
Rupert Goold
was born in 1977. He studied at Cambridge and was an assistant director at the Donmar Warehouse under Sam Mendes. After undertaking a range of experimental work, in 2006–07 he directed two highly acclaimed Shakespearean productions with the veteran stage and television actor Patrick Stewart:
The Tempest
, part of the RSC’s year-long Complete Works Festival, and the intimate modern-dress
Macbeth
at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, which transferred to London’s West End, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and finally Broadway. It garnered multiple awards in London and was nominated for six Tony awards in New York. In 2009 Goold became an associate director of the RSC.
At the end of the play Malcolm describes the Macbeths as a “dead butcher” and his “fiend-like queen”: but there’s got to be more to them than that, hasn’t there? In the case of Lady Macbeth in particular, there’s a long tradition of actresses wrestling with her human side (“Had he not resembled / My father,” and all that).
Nunn:
In many ways,
Macbeth
concentrates thematically on the nature of evil, and therefore, the play is also, through the strands of the Banquo story and the Malcolm/Macduff story climaxing in the England scene, about the nature of goodness. But something else explains the
structure
of the play, and binds its many elements together; it is an examination of belief, or as we more commonly say, faith. The successful, highly regarded, trustworthy general Macbeth is inclined to believe the weyard sisters encountered on the heath, and equally clearly his comrade and friend Banquo is not. When the first element of the sisters’ strange prophecy comes true, Macbeth is persuaded entirely to believe in their prophetic utterances, to the point of writing to his wife about this “road to Damascus” revelation. She is obviously more than willing to be recruited to this belief, and thereafter she clings to it as extremely as a fundamentalist terrorist to religious validation.
Macbeth’s waverings endanger both him and his wife, to the point where his belief in the prophecies has to be revitalized if he is to go on. His return visit to the witches, indicating that, despite the bad news about Fleance, Macbeth is invulnerable, fuels the final section of the play, as the invading warriors imbued with the opposite (and very Christian) faith are carried along by their own certainties. The end comes in the form of a “bad joke” as the revitalized Macbeth realizes that the phrase “born of woman,” which will protect him against all-comers, doesn’t include a child entering the world by means of a primitive Caesarean. Macbeth’s next words, after taking in that his faith has been founded on a semantic quibble, are “I’ll not fight with thee.” His belief has dissolved, and with it his resolution, his invulnerability, and his sense of destiny.
Doran:
Lady Macbeth is certainly not a “fiend-like queen.” I think she is driven to do something that she doesn’t allow herself to think
through; she has a kind of myopia. Whereas Macbeth thinks rather a lot—too much, in a way—she suppresses her imagination. Lady Macbeth has only one very short soliloquy in the entire play, when she realizes that she has become queen at the cost of having blood on her hands:
Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
I think she realizes that her husband no longer has any real use for her. At the end of the banquet scene she realizes that Macbeth has left her, he has moved on, and is going to continue to secure himself as king and eliminate his enemies. She seems to have no knowledge of his plans anymore. We discovered a moment whereby she picked up a candle to light her way to her bedchamber as she left the banqueting table and all the other candles went out; it was the influence of the three weyard sisters, who had been under the table all the time. In other words, Lady Macbeth is haunted by her conscience, and what Harriet [Walter] made clear in the sleepwalking scene is that here is a woman who has insisted that her husband do this terrible deed in order to get the crown, and then immediately finds both the emptiness of the role and also that her relationship with her husband has somehow diminished. And I think that is very poignant.
As for Macbeth as a “butcher,” the experience of watching the play is that you don’t feel Macbeth is just a ruthless tyrant. That’s partly due to how he is haunted and how the play’s imagery supports that. He says, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” and “They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly,” as if he is some terrible bear chained to a stake and attacked by dogs. The imagery supports his status as almost a victim. You get a sense in performance that once he has realized the sin he has committed, his struggle to carry on living makes him worthy of our pity. And Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, where you see how much she is being punished by her own conscience, is a devastating portrayal of a human soul in disintegration.
Goold:
History is written by the victors, and so in one sense that is all they are. One of the things the play seems to be exploring is the tension between social and political identity versus the individual psyche. However, in Lady Macbeth’s case I also always thought that it was important that she was, to a certain degree, a two-dimensional character—a “fiend-like queen.” It is her single-minded remorseless ambition that is set against Macbeth’s huge complexity. Too often I think great actresses try and give backstory or humanity to a woman who, while we can pity her hugely, never shows us she is more than a psychopath. It is that chilling viciousness that makes the part so iconic and so potent.
How did you invoke the sense of the supernatural for a modern audience who might be more skeptical about those aspects of the play than theatergoers would have been in Shakespeare’s day?
Nunn:
My production dressed Duncan more as a priest than a military king, so that he had an iconic, rather papal aura which not only suggested a prevailing religious conformity in the social structure, but accentuated the heinous and unthinkable quality of the murder. Apart from that emphasis, there was very little of a hieratic nature in the presentation because extreme naturalistic credibility was the aim and intention of all that we did with a text rich in imagery, but equally daring in the use of slang, conversational rhythm, interrupted thought, and the vocabulary of domestic squabble. In The Other Place, it was possible to speak without projection, indeed to whisper and be heard by everyone, and this gave a sense for the audience not so much of being at a play as of overhearing conversations which put everybody present in equal danger. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were at the point of committing the murder of Duncan, I had placed all the other actors at vantage points invisibly around the theater, and asked them to breathe heavily, as if sleeping. The effect, of a silence so profound that people peacefully and innocently asleep in the house could be clearly heard, was genuinely gripping and terrifying, as well as prefiguring Macbeth’s nightmare that he will sleep no more, that he has murdered sleep. Ian McKellen and
Judi Dench were quite extraordinary in their ability to observe the rules of the text but make exchanges like this seem totally naturalistic, almost improvised. This “experience” of sleep also connected to Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in her fitful confessional, which again we tried to make as real as if caught on a hospital CCTV camera.
Doran:
I noticed that the word “fear” (and linked to it “afraid,” “fearsome,” “fearful”) is a very important theme in the play. At the beginning of rehearsals I got everybody in the company to describe a time when they had been really afraid: afraid for their safety, the safety of their children; afraid of spiders, heights, whatever. People described in detail their experiences of fear and we tried to tap into the reality of what that experience is: what it does to the human body; what it does to your breath; and how we could communicate that sense of fear.