Macbeth (24 page)

The text seems to support the view that Lady Macbeth has lost a child in the past. Do you agree, and what implications did this have for her character and the relationship between the Macbeths in your production? Children and childlessness do keep recurring in the play, don’t they?

Nunn:
Duncan has children to inherit his crown. Banquo has a child who will be the progenitor of a line of kings. Macduff has children, who can be used to cause the ultimate suffering for the father’s disloyalty. Macbeth, essential to Shakespeare’s scheme, has no children. The glimpse that we are given of a past time of joy and sublimation for the Macbeths in the passing reference to “I have given suck” sets up unspoken reverberations which are vast, as we realize that childlessness is possibly the prime cause for Macbeth craving power in lieu of a future investment in the next generation. Clearly that back-story of the lost child is vital for developing the character of Lady Macbeth, and the use of the image of the baby at the breast, so painfully part of their shared marital history, in demanding action from her husband, shows how extreme she is prepared to be. But as with all offstage events, I think it would be a mistake to give that strand of the story a prominence that is never articulated in the text. Shakespeare provides us with a suggestion and I would recommend that therefore it’s what he wants, the tip and not the iceberg.

Doran:
Because Lady Macbeth says “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,” she clearly has had a child before. It seemed to us to be most fruitful to decide that this was a child that the Macbeths have had and which has died, rather than being either a fantasy on her part or the child of another marriage. Also later on Macduff says “he has no children,” after Macbeth has slain Macduff’s entire family. We spent a lot of time with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter [who played the Macbeths] discussing what this meant, and we decided that this was a taboo subject for them, which they had suppressed; they had never talked about it. That is
why it is at that crucial moment, as Macbeth decides while the king is banqueting that he can no longer go ahead with their proposed plan to murder him, that she brings up the subject. It focuses his mind and makes him realize how serious she is. That became crucial to the playing of the scene. Because they couldn’t have children the Macbeths required something else in which to pour their energies, which they thought would be the crown. The dead child became a catalyst in their decision to go ahead with the plan. So from that point of view it was very important.

We also extended the idea. When Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to Dunsinane, we had Macduff there with his wife and their children. As Lady Macduff, this fecund woman with all her pretty children, passed Lady Macbeth, Harriet gave her a very wan smile, and you could tell that children were something she desperately wanted, but that now, somehow because of her dead child, was unable to have. This was a moment on which we were able to focus particularly in the filmed version. So the lack of children in Lady Macbeth’s world became very important for us. She needed to replace that with some other ambition.

Goold:
Is the child even Macbeth’s? In the sources there is a suggestion she has been married before and Macbeth is the conqueror of her previous husband. We talked about the issue a lot in rehearsal but in playing it seemed to lose its significance, at least for Lady Macbeth, who never mentions it again; when in her sleepwalking she acknowledges the crimes against Macduff, it is more for the loss of his wife than his children. I think it haunts the childless Macbeth more, and I always found his fear that Banquo would come to the crown, “No son of mine succeeding,” very moving. In our production we had a significant age gap between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and so sex was more significant than children. Child-killers are, though, a recurrent theme from the murder attempt on Fleance, through to the Macduffs and by way of the sow “that hath eaten / Her nine farrow.” We tried to accentuate the vulnerability of children by having Macduff and his wife and family arrive on the night of Duncan’s murder, to put their family in the foreground prior to the Lady Macduff scene.

How did you stage the banquet scene where Macbeth is confronted by Banquo’s ghost that only he can see?

Nunn:
Staying true to the principle that everything must be entirely credible in our small space, I decided that the ghost of Banquo must be only in Macbeth’s mind at the banquet, just as the dagger that he saw before him was no such thing. I remember we rehearsed the scene with Banquo there, before removing him, so that Ian McKellen could gauge precisely what he would do if he discovered a corpse accusing him at his dinner table. The impact in performance was truly upsetting, one might say sickening, as I think no lighting effect or ghostly makeup would have been.

Doran:
Macbeth dismissed a servant to get some wine to fill up everybody’s goblets so they could make a toast. When he turned around to see the servant return it was actually Banquo, who then disappeared amongst the guests. That was quite freaky for the audience. They knew the man coming back was the servant, but then suddenly when they looked he had turned into Banquo. It created quite a shock.

8. The Macbeths have only each other: Antony Sher and Harriet Walter in Gregory Doran’s 1999 production.

Goold:
For ages I wrestled with the twin academic positions: that one needs to see the ghost and so feel the full horror of the scene for Macbeth; and on the other hand, that we should never see him so we can focus on the scorpions in Macbeth’s mind. Then I looked at the scene again and realized it was close to where the interval, if there is to be one, is usually taken (at the end of this scene). This gave me the idea of playing the scene twice—once where we see the ghost and then again when we don’t. So we took the interval at a hugely intense moment as the blood-boltered Banquo strode down the table to challenge his king having descended in a lift bleeding all over the walls (in a shameless steal from
The Shining
!). We then returned, replayed the scene from the start with some minor changes (the dialogue between Macbeth and the murderer was inaudible the second time, so we focused on the guests and the excluded Lady Macbeth), and then at the moment the ghost arrived we saw nothing. We then stayed in Macbeth’s world until we found another moment for a sudden and shocking arrival of the ghost at an unexpected moment later in the scene.

And what about the Porter?

Nunn:
We were very fortunate in having the young Iain McDiarmid as the Porter, and we used his Scottishness to the full, not to mention his flamboyant comedic bravura. He was a very real, hungover, cussed Porter, but he spoke directly to the audience, involving them and almost forcing them to laugh in the midst of their distress and grief at what they had just witnessed. As he does in so many of the plays—like the Clown bringing the asp to Cleopatra—Shakespeare lightens the tone just before he darkens it to something even deeper than it was.

Doran:
The Porter is a great moment; suddenly there is this unexpected, funny scene right at the height of the drama, the tragedy, and the tension. It’s a brilliant device. The difficulty is to make it funny, because the jokes, about Henry Garnet and Jesuits, are very topical. We had a rather brilliant actor called Stephen Noonan who happened to be a very clever imitator, so I allowed him a bit of leeway. He did use the text but he would talk to the audience. When it
came to the line “What are you?” occasionally some people replied, for example with “I’m a teacher,” and that gave him license to say “Well, you’re certainly going to hell,” or whatever. There was one wonderful moment one night when he said, “What are you?” to a lady on the front row. She replied “Is this in the play?” and Steve said, “Well,
I’m
in the play.” It was a great, sort of weird, Pirandellian moment! He also did impersonations of Tony Blair as the equivocator, which of course at the time, as any politician was saying white is black and black is white, seemed to be very appropriate. It caught the mood of the Porter scene. Mind you, our playing time was one hour fifty-eight, but it could stretch to two hours and seven minutes depending on how long the Porter went on! He crashed out of a trap on the stage, and he was a very violent, disgusting creature who was both intimidating and hilariously funny. What we tried to do was translate the topical allusions and the weird freshness of the wit while using as much of the text as possible to do that. I think in the film version he uses virtually all of the text.

Goold:
The first speech is impenetrable and cursed because people expect it to be funny. We made the familiar double with Seyton and just tried to make him as scary and threatening as possible: the kind of morbid thug who would usually end up in prison in a well-balanced society but in times of strife and chaos finds himself working the gas chambers. It is indicative of Macbeth’s employ that he has hired such a man—perhaps an old soldier. The comedy must have been electric in 1606 after the publicity surrounding the execution of the original equivocator Father Garnet, but unless one allows the actor to improvise—something we tried but that never seemed quite right—it’s very hard. I have some truck with the idea that the comedy is necessary, not to lighten or change the mood in the play but to introduce the scabrous bleak humor that will eventually consume the nihilistically ironic Macbeth in Act 5.

The text is a lot shorter than is the case in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, so you don’t have to cut so much—and some productions have achieved great intensity by having no interval. By the same account, some of the most successful productions have
had the intimacy of chamber or black-box productions: were pace and claustrophobia among the qualities you looked for?

Doran:
Absolutely they were. We really learned that from Trevor Nunn’s 1976 production. We were able to play it in the Swan very fast without an interval. Shakespeare didn’t have intervals, but of course he quite often gives the lead actor a big scene off in Act 4. Macbeth has the England scene when he can relax. I think the only cut we made was Hecate, because I’m sure that’s a bit of Middleton; it seems to me to be inferior.

I think somebody once said that, in
Macbeth
, if anyone had time to think the events wouldn’t happen. The furious pace of the text is crucial; things happen in this terrible whirlwind. The claustrophobia of the play is intensified by Shakespeare’s lighting effects; he’s brilliant at lighting his own plays. There isn’t a single scene in
Macbeth
that takes place in daylight. At the beginning of the England scene Malcolm says, “Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there / Weep our sad bosoms empty.” And there is one scene between the old man and Ross where “by th’clock, ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.” It’s always dark and gloomy. The shadows Shakespeare creates we fill with our own fear, therefore the claustrophobia and the darkness of the play are crucial. It’s famously a play that is often better when you read it than when you see it in the theater, because of that complicity of your imagination. If you can in performance suggest, allow the audience to engage their own fear, they will fill those shadows with their own dark imaginings. That contribution, the intensity of the audience’s reaction, increases the tension of the play.

Goold:
Claustrophobia is vital, at least in Acts 1, 2, and 5. Our production opened in the three-sided Minerva Studio in Chichester, and so from the start we knew we had to effectively stage the play on a single set—in our case, a space that was part-hospital, part-kitchen, and part-morgue. However, the claustrophobia must be unusual, and one of our greatest successes was in Howard Harrison’s bright, hard lighting throughout the play that stopped the crepuscular gloom that many productions (and actors!) get lost in. Kubrick’s
2001
is hugely claustrophobic but searingly bright, as is Ridley
Scott’s
Alien
. Pace was something that I felt much more ambivalent about. I know that the received wisdom is to play
Macbeth
pell-mell but I guess you have to respond to your actors. Patrick Stewart, older than many Macbeths and exploring that sense of mortality throughout, brought to the role his own thoughtful and intense charisma—one that counterpointed well with Kate Fleetwood’s quicksilver fury as Lady Macbeth. I always felt the play would fight back if we got too measured—and it often did, but almost always in Acts 3 and 5—but that we shouldn’t set out to turn up the speed without letting the language out first. After all, we see gripping, pacy murder stories all the time; what distinguishes
Macbeth
into a league shared maybe only with
Crime and Punishment
is the depth of its interior psychology. These things shouldn’t always be rushed.

The one scene where the pace seems to flag is that at the English court. But then this interlude is particularly important for the development of Malcolm and Macduff, isn’t it?