humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

Friday the weather turned inclement, seven to nine inches of snow,
rumors of ice storms and sleet and who knows what-all. New Yorkers
know what this means: the museums will be empty, the theaters
uncrowded. About 6:15, I headed for the Brooklyn Academy of Music
where the Chichester Festival was performing Macbeth, the entire run
sold out. I was offered cheap seats upstairs and expensive seats in
Row R or Row B in the orchestra. Row B was way over my budget - but
screw the budget.
It was my third Macbeth since last summer - fourth, if you
count the
second season of Slings & Arrows on DVD. First off there was the
rather tidy one at the Istanbul Opera in October; then the special-
effects and glamour one at the Met. For Chichester, mysteriously, they
did not play Verdi's score. It was halfway through before I noticed
this lacuna - I guess I'd been humming it - but suddenly there were a
couple of scenes that Verdi did not set in his opera, and I noticed
that only I had been musicalizing. (Considering what Guleghina did
with her cabalettas, this was sort of a relief.) Then I realized that
not only was the text being spoken, not sung, but all of it - every
word of Shakespeare - was on display, which is not the usual thing at
all. Some lines were reassigned, but they were all there.
The star was Patrick Stewart, a good name for an actor playing
a
Scottish king - though the Stewart dynasty were the descendants of
Banquo and Fleance. A short, stocky, handsome, aging gentleman with a
completely shaven head, PS looked familiar somehow - oh yes, he was
the excellent Prospero in the Central Park Tempest a decade back. And
didn't he do something on TV? A detective addicted to lollipops? I
could be wrong.
Both he and Kate Fleetwood, the excellent Lady M, avoided the
usual
pitfall: they were not ghastly from the get-go. Macbeth was a jolly
good fellow - but muttering under his breath. He plays practical jokes
on his party guests - and only from their expressions do you realize
that they are all scared of him, that this is a tyrant's dinner party,
that they know they could all be dragged off and shot in an instant.
His mood stays buoyant until, in the last scenes, you realizes it is a
last stratagem against despair. When the doctor says uneasily that
Lady M is tormented by dreams and moods, Macbeth cries, cheerily,
"Cure her of that!" and it got a laugh.
Fleetwood, chosen in part exactly because she was so much
younger
than Stewart, so that she can be seen to be using her sexual promise
to keep him ambitious, did some charming things, showing the terror
lurking beneath her determination to do evil. When Duncan arrived at
the castle, she and her staff were chopping things up in the kitchen,
and she had an apron on. Having already plotted his murder, she had
the grace to be embarrassed, to laugh and blush and pass it off as
confusion at being seen in kitchen clothes - she rushed to a sink and
washed her hands, a move that we were intended to note (and, of
course, remember - in the sleepwalking scene, when the faucets ran
red, which since it can only be true in her dream, was perhaps
overkill). (But we jumped, as we were intended to.)
The play, Macbeth, is the tragedy of an ordinary man -
neither
overly good nor overtly evil - who commits a deed he knows to be
wicked, fully aware of what it will mean. Worst of all, he is an
imaginative man - he foresees things - sometimes things that are not
there. He has regrets, too - he cannot lie to himself, tell himself it
is a worthwhile action (as most of us can when we violate our better
instincts), or pretend later that there is anyone else to blame.
Rightly he does not blame his wife (as many a real man would), or the
witches - he has walked into this, eyes open (to this world and other
worlds), and the play examines the problem of why such a man would do
so. (Since so many do.) Considering how often the devil is mentioned
in the play (a lot), Shakespeare blames him very little. Macbeth has
doomed himself. When he reaches the pit of despair, we shudder, and
are meant to. No one but Malcolm triumphs. (The crowing of Hecate and
the witches is an interpolation by Middleton, and it was not played at
BAM; I have never seen a production of the play that did use it.)
Stewart, who has said, "I realized I've known these speeches
all my
life," speaks them as if their knotty paths were only just opening to
him. He speculates on the witches' motives, on the phantom dagger, on
Macduff's flight, on the miserable conclusion of his ambitions, on the
point of surviving at all. He displays his mind. It is all very clear
and nimble. I was riveted. (But then, I was in Row B.)
I've never been sure how I'd stage the Ghost of Banquo - the
usual
bloody fellow appearing suddenly from the crowd does not satisfy me.
Perhaps, I thought, I'd have no one there at all, Macbeth pointing at
nothing, so that we could share the consternation of the guests. I'd
have liked to have it both ways - the horror Macbeth sees and the
other horror - a madman in mid-fit - seen by everyone else - but I
couldn't figure out how to manage that. That, no doubt, is why Rupert
Goold, not I, was chosen to direct the production - he shared my
ambition, and he figured out how to pull it off.
You can break a Shakespeare play almost anywhere in reason,
and I was
not sure when the break would come - before or after Banquo's death,
before or after the banquet and apparition scene that follows. I had
never thought of breaking it in the middle of the latter scene. (In
the opera, of course, one cannot do that - the concertato that ends
the scene must also end the act.) Goold played the banquet scene
through Macbeth's confabulation with the half-achieving murderer; then
he sat at the table and the Ghost entered, drenched in blood, and
marched down the long table to Macbeth (who had his back to us and
therefore might be imagined as aghast as we liked). At which point,
blackout, intermission. Then, to start again, the whole scene again,
this time from the guests' point of view - they did not hear what
Macbeth was muttering to the murderer, and there was no visible Banquo
- only a king howling outrage and horror. But we knew what he was
seeing. Clever.
The Witches were surgical nurses. (They were surgical nurses
at the
Istanbul Opera too - makes more sense than Monty Python bag ladies
with awkward shoes and tiny handbags, as at the Met.) I cottoned to
this before most people - they were working on the Bloody Sergeant
during his rather excessive report on Macbeth's generalship to Duncan
in the opening scene. (Scene ii in the printed text, but no matter.)
When Duncan bade someone "see to his wounds" and departed, the nurses
calmly murdered him (gasps of horror around me), and launched "When
shall we three meet again" (scene i in the printed text). Later they
were servants at Macbeth's banquet, making him uneasy. (I wasn't crazy
about that, but I don't think the witches should be made too powerful
- they tempt Macbeth, but they do not make him do things - this was a
mistake the Istanbul - and many other - Macbeths make; the witches
manipulated everything: handing Macbeth the letter to write to his
wife, delivering the letter, arming the murderers, empowering everyone
- flying in the teeth of Free Will, a concept Shakespeare makes clear
is quite enough to account for Macbeth's bad behavior.)
What did seem to be made clear was that when he first meets
the
witches, Macbeth is wary of them; he is willing to not act, to let the
crown come to him, if it's going to. And after all, it is they who
confront him - they tempt him (and don't bother with Banquo) because
they know he's already been speculating crown-wards. In contrast, when
he seeks them out on the heath, he wants them - though he bullies and
insults them, he desperately needs their reassurance and no longer
automatically distrusts their words. By the end of the scene, he is
totally given up to them, and therefore (unspoken) to Hell - it is his
only hope, since he cannot speak Amen, cannot ask God for help in what
he well knows are unholy deeds. His ego is not barefaced enough (as
real tyrants' egos surely are) to see his own deeds as necessarily
right, and all opposition as necessarily evil. He is unable to lie to
himself - an ability surely most criminals possess. "You lack the
season of all natures, sleep," says his lady (almost her last waking
utterance). It is his conscience that refuses to sleep - but he has
already defied it. "I am afraid to think what I have done." But he
can't stop thinking. Every murder he commits after the king's - the
grooms, Banquo, the Macduff family - is unnecessary, but they are
active, and he is willing to do anything rather than be pensive. He
sleeps no more. His imagination cannot be unloosed. (And from his
lady's fate, we know what could happen if it were.)
From the second witches' encounter, therefore, the scene of
the
apparitions, Macbeth is wholly theirs. That they have betrayed him
without lying gives them no pleasure - it is what he really wanted -
that they'd tell him he was secure when he knows in his heart of
hearts that he can never be secure, that he deserves the punishments
he's going to get. They tell him what he wants.
The witches' recipe-spell is another pitfall for a director,
and this
one Goold has miscalculated. They rap the spell, and at such a pace
that not a word of it is intelligible but the refrain, "Double,
double." Most rappers have pretty decent diction, but not these dames.
(One of them had a pleasing Scottish accent in her solo lines, but not
here.) The words burbled by unheard, and our attention flagged - I
could not help contrasting this with the wedding masque in Stewart's
Tempest, a scene usually dropped or ignored - when three ladies on
stilts in enormous gowns came in chanting their lines in Caribbean
rhythms - the image was striking, the verse catchy, the moment
riveting while (appropriately) outside the experience of the play,
another world - it is a visitation of three goddesses, after all.
Perhaps Big Bill wrote it, hoping to attain the popular appeal of the
apparition scene in Macbeth, which became (and long remained) one of
the most audience-catching parts of the play, a big draw, music and
light and special effects. And of course both were designed to appeal
to the highly theatrical king, James VI and I (eighth kingly
descendant of Banquo), who believed in witches, read of gods, and
adored masques - whose daughter's wedding may have been the occasion
for the writing of The Tempest.
The apparitions were contorted figures in body bags. Not bad.
The
witches spoke their lines (they also did in Istanbul). Fine.
Lady Macduff and her children (who had earlier appeared in the
waking-
of-Duncan scene) were given some originality here. Suzanne Burden was
so upset by impending doom as to speak her lines in a fretful humor
rather than the usual sentimentality. Tim Treloar played Ross (and
lines of several other characters) as a weathervane-watching suit who
develops a conscience over time. The porter (and other characters),
Christopher Patrick Nolan (a little too melodramatically sinister),
performed what all London Shakespeare now requires: the onstage
pissing scene. He dwelt on the "E-qui-vo-ca-tors" a bit heartily in
his Hell-gate monologue, a moment that has been connected to the
Jesuits implicated in Guy Fawkes's Plot around the time (it is
generally guessed) of the play's premiere. But as I thought about it,
the whole play, not just some imaginary damned person, is about
equivocation - Macbeth bargaining with the Devil, with Fate, with his
own sanity. "Don't be this sort of king," James is being urged - with
the examples of his virtuous ancestors, Duncan, Malcolm, Banquo and
Fleance to inspire him.
The murder of Banquo was set on a subway car packed with
huddled and
indifferent commuters - it sort of worked. (At the Met, it's a crowd
of homeless tramps around a fire. In Istanbul, the witches loaned
knives and surgical gowns to the murderers. None of these approaches
was entirely satisfactory, but the Met's was just silly.) I was least
happy with Scott Feast's constantly menacing Macduff and Scott Handy's
vacant-eyed Malcolm, and least happy of all with their "temptation"
scene together, which was set in either a temperance hall or a music-
hall - difficult to know which. People around me who did not know the
play did not understand what was going on in this scene at all; I of
course did, but the debate was not made interesting. I liked the
background slides best when a very green, effective Birnam Wood
surrounded Malcolm and his commanders, and when the blood began to
ooze about in curlicue patterns, illustrating the mind of Macbeth
without distracting us from Stewart's speaking of the speeches. The
blood was probably more effective at a distance - close up it looked
too theatrical a scarlet. Paul Shelley, a tolerable Duncan, was more
effective as the Doctor. Polly Frame did the gentlewoman well.
On the whole I'd have to call it the most satisfactorily
understated
staging of the play in my experience - and this is a play that almost
demands, but very ill rewards, overstatement. The blood is all there,
and the hysteria; you don't need to add more, overwhelming as the
temptation may be. Stewart and Fleetwood and Goold resist that
temptation; they give us a play, not an out-and-out spookshow.
(c) John Yohalem, 2008

Cafeteria Rusticana: hanslick.blogspot.com/