After killing King Duncan and two guards to claim the Scottish throne, Macbeth complains that all the world’s oceans cannot wash his hands, which would make “the numerous seas incarnadine.” This year it is a multifarious play, for in the past six months I have seen five Macbeths across England turn the stages red with blood.
David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, playing the Macbeths at the Donmar Warehouse in London, follows Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma (Liverpool Depot, now on tour), Reuben Joseph and Valene Kane (RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon), Mike Noble and Laura Elsworthy for English Touring Theater (starting at Shakespeare Playhouse North in Prescot, now underway) and Max Bennett and Matti Houghton (Shakespeare’s Globe, London).
Few plays are shown so closely – if it happened to A Midsummer Night’s Dream I would leave the country – but Macbeth is such a profound and ambiguous work that the repetition never became tiresome and raised many questions about why and how to perform the 1606. tragedy.
Why is 2023 the year of Macbeth?
Four conservative prime ministers in eight years – some of whom apparently take action in the party for five out of nine – inevitably make a play about a failing state and threatened leaders topical. But while this year’s earlier Macbeths were clearly influenced by national politics, the latest shows more international influence, coming from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Simon Godwin’s production is approached on Frankie Bradshaw’s set, through a wasteland of bombed buildings and burning trucks.
Were Macbeth’s predecessor and successor better bets?
During the course of Macbeth, Scotland has three kings: Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm. And a crucial administrative decision is the relative merits of these leaders. Fiennes, Bennett and Noble’s Macbeths all have strikingly comic, clownish moments – as in the line ‘Twas a rough night’, after the first three murders – that seem reminiscent of the inappropriate comedy of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and the general unfitness for power of recent leaders in Britain and the US. (The Fiennes-Varda version, directed by Godwin, goes next year to the Shakespearean theater that Godwin runs in Washington DC, where Macbeth will also have American relevance as two aging political kings, Biden and Trump, fight for a cursed throne.)
One effect of this reading is that Duncan (as happened with Theresa May) seems more impressive in retrospect, encouraged by younger and stronger kings – Ross Walton for English Touring Theater (ETT), Keith Fleming in the Fiennes version – than he used to. being the case. In the Donmar production, directed by Max Webster, Benny Young’s monarch dances powerful roles on the last night of his life. This sparkling casting resolves the plot obstacle that in some previous productions the king seemed unlikely to spend the night at Glamis Castle even if he had not been stabbed to death.
Both the RSC and Globe cast Duncan as a woman, with Tamzin Griffin and Therese Bradley playing powerful queens whose removal by Macbeth turns the regicide into a patriarchal restoration, a feminist interpretation further complicated by his wife’s involvement in the plot to to kill the queen. Logically, this reading also begs the question of why, if women can rule Scotland, Lady Macbeth does not seize power for herself, rather than wage the campaign of a reluctant husband.
In Abigail Graham’s production at the Globe, it was made clear that Joseph Payne’s nervous, nerdy Malcolm was at risk of being Liz Truss to Bennett’s Johnson, further shattering already lowered expectations. Godwin’s version is more optimistic about succession. Ewan Black’s Malcolm, a man of integrity in a green sweater, seems clearly to be appealing to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose victory takes on extra resonance because of the increasingly Putinesque feel of Fiennes’ paranoid strongman, the Scottish king. Godwin implicitly manifests Russia’s defeat by Ukraine.
Tennant is succeeded by Ros Watt’s strikingly young, almost teenage Malcolm, which could be seen as a plea for countries to put their trust in younger generations, or as a warning against the gamble of doing so.
What happened to Lady Macbeth’s baby?
Lady Macbeth has “nursed,” but the couple is childless. All five versions intensively explore her fertility and maternal instincts. To cries of “Ew!” of school parties, the ETT version – directed by Richard Twyman – opens with the clearly distressed character expressing milk with a breast pump and storing the latest bottle alongside rows of others in a refrigerator, dramatizing the physical cruelty with which mothers who lose babies continue to breastfeed . At the RSC and Globe, Lady M sculpted a fake baby from clothing or bed linen. Surprisingly, Fiennes kneels before Varma and utters the phrase, “Produce only male children,” directly into her reproductive areas.
Lady Macbeth has become a stereotype of a woman’s manipulative power over a supposedly weaker husband – an accusation that has been (wrongly) leveled against Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair in recent history. Actors are understandably nervous about perpetuating this slur, so Kane at the RSC and Houghton at the Globe made the character more skittish and nervous than usual, suggesting that Lady Macbeth had obvious mental illness in the sleepwalking and blood-washing scene in Act 5 (“damn place, get out!”) may have had an earlier beginning, perhaps with the death of her child.
After the disastrous dinner party attended by the deceased Banquo, Tennant delivers the lines “Come, we’ll sleep” and “We are but young at heart” to his wife, with the apparent meaning that they might have another child that evening. But Jumbo ignores him and walks in the apparent direction of a separate bedroom. In the brutal denouement, Tennant Young hugs Siward and seems tempted to adopt him before giving the child the ending demanded by the direction. The Donmar program includes an essay on “postpartum depression” and while sleepwalking, Jumbo holds the hand and strokes the head of an imaginary/remembered child.
So the play, which was previously seen as a political/marital psychodrama, now seems to be seen as a parental tragedy.
What is the role of the witches?
In Wils Wilson’s RSC staging the witches were clearly supernatural and came across the stage in an eerie way. At the Globe, it was very human or inhuman men in white forensic crime scene overalls who wheeled autopsy stretchers across the stage to receive each of the play’s eight corpses. Also, the three sisters serve as evil stage managers who pursue Fiennes, gaining exits and entrances that Shakespeare had not imagined, and nervously watch as their prophecies come true.
Tennant’s prophetic voices may only exist in his head – unseen they bicker and giggle to sound designer Gareth Fry’s binaural backing track, played into the headphones worn by the audience.
Can the Porter scene ever work?
Directors and scholars often worry about the second scene of Act 3, where, after Duncan’s murder, the Porter of Hell-Gate shows up for a scene of stand-up comedy about who is sent to damnation (Catholics) and the consequences of excessive drinking. about urination and erections. The abrupt change in tone and possible authorship (some believe it was improvised by an actor) is difficult to integrate into an otherwise lean, linear tragedy.
In these productions, the Porter’s treatment ranges from cutting the scene entirely and part (Godwin’s production, adapted by Emily Burns) to hiring Stewart Lee to write new topical material, including jokes against Boris Johnson and hedge funders, for comedian Alison Peebles. to perform at the RSC, or Jatinder Singh Randhawa improvising around the text at the Donmar, with jokes about Suella Braverman and a dispute with an usher who tries to remove him from the venue.
The problem of Act 3, Scene 5, Line 26
The ingredients the witches throw into their cauldron include “liver of blasphemous Jews.” Long problematic – the RSC version, which opened in August, removed it as part of a longer six-line reduction of the witches’ brew – this became even worse after the conflict arising from the massacre of Israelis by the Palestinian Hamas on October 7 . At the Globe, a witch pointed to a younger viewer and said, “liver of a child like you.” In the ETT, Fiennes and Tennant versions the ingredient was cut.
Which Macbeth is king?
The two superstars in the role each deliver the verse impeccably, offering contrasting masterclasses in classical acting – Fiennes demonstrative and sonorous, with Tennant internalizing the character’s crisis through the narrow microphones feeding our headphones as he whispers a few lines. At the RSC, Joseph also stood out for his verbal power, while the Globe’s Bennett justified the bold (and timely) choice of making the thane a man who knows from the start that he is not fit for power, while Noble for ETT skewered the conceited comedy. That illustrates real politics.
But it is the last of the five that opens the crown. The sold-out Tennant-Jumbo production’s matinees end at 4:30 p.m. At that moment, on a freezing December afternoon, people were already queuing for the return of the evening show.