by After killing King Duncan and two guards to claim the throne of Scotland, Macbeth laments that all the oceans of the world cannot wash their hands, which would make “the multitudinous far incarnadine”. This year, the play was multifaceted because, for the past six months, I have watched five Macbeths turn stages around England red with gore.
David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, playing the Macbeths at the Donmar Warehouse in London, follow Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma (Liverpool Warehouse, 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 on the road) and Max Bennett and Matti Houghton (Shakespeare’s Globe, London).
Few plays get such intimate performances – if it happened to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’d leave the country – but Macbeth is such a deep and ambiguous work that the repetition was never so tiring and so uplifting. questions about why and how to represent the 1606. tragedy.
Why is 2023 the year of Macbeth?
Four Conservative Prime Ministers in eight years – and some in the party seem to be struggling for five out of nine – makes for a timely drama about a failing state and leaders under threat. But, where the Macbeths earlier this year were clearly inflected by national politics, the latest show has more international influence, from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Simon Godwin’s production, on Frankie Bradshaw’s set, is approaching, although it’s a wasteland of bombed buildings and burning trucks.
Did Macbeth’s predecessor and successor promise better?
In the course of Macbeth, Scotland has three kings – Duncan, Macbeth and Malcolm. And a critical managerial decision is the relative merits of these leaders. The Macbeths of Fiennes, Bennett and Noble have great moments of comedy – for example on the line, “Twas a rough night”, after the first three murders – the inappropriate comedy guests of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and the Dr. the general unsuitability to power of recent leaders in the UK and US. (The Fiennes-Varda version, directed by Godwin, goes next year to the Godwin-run Shakespeare theater in Washington DC, where Macbeth will also have American relevance, and two aging political kings, Biden and Trump, fighting for a cursed throne. )
The effect of this reading is to make Duncan seem more prominent in retrospect (as with Theresa May) and encouraged by younger and stronger kings – Ross Walton for the English Touring Theater (ETT), Keith Fleming in the Fiennes version – than it used to be. be the case. In the Donmar production, directed by Max Webster, Benny Young’s monarch vivaciously dances reels on the last night of his life. This exciting resolution resolves the unlikely plot obstacle that, in some past productions, the King would not have survived the night in Glamis castle even if he had not been executed.
The RSC and the Globe cast a female Duncan, with Tamzin Griffin and Therese Bradley playing lively queens, when Macbeth removes the regicide to carry out the patriarchal reformation regicide, a more complex feminist interpretation involving his wife in the plot to kill a queen . Logically, this reading also raises the question of why, if women can rule Scotland, Lady Macbeth does not seize power for herself, rather than run the campaign of a reluctant husband.
In Abigail Graham’s performance at the Globe, it was clear that Joseph Payne’s nervous Malcolm was in danger of becoming Liz Truss to Johnson Bennett – lowering already low expectations. Godwin’s version is more optimistic about the succession. Malcolm Ewan Black, an honest man in a green sweater, appears to be suing Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which has added resonance because of Fiennes’ paranoid strongman Putinesque sense of the Scottish king. Godwin implicitly shows Russia’s victory over Ukraine.
Young Malcolm, close to teenage Ros Watt, succeeds Tennant, which can be seen as an advocacy for countries to put faith in the younger generations or as a warning against gambling to do so.
What happened to Lady Macbeth’s baby?
“Lady Macbeth gave a “sock”, but the couple are childless. All five versions intensely explore her fertility and maternal instincts. His shrieks of “Ew!” from school parties, the ETT version – directed by Richard Twyman – begins with the clearly bereaved character expressing milk with a breast pump and storing the latest bottle alongside rows of others in a fridge, showing the physical cruelty which mothers who lose babies continue to breastfeed. . At the RSC and the Globe, Lady M sculpted a fake baby out of clothes or bed sheets. Shockingly, Fiennes kneels before Varma and speaks the line, “Bring out only men’s children”, directly into her reproductive areas.
Lady Macbeth has become a stereotype of a wife’s manipulative power over a supposedly weaker husband – a charge that was (falsely) made recently against Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair. Actors are understandably nervous about perpetuating this crowd and so Kane at the RSC and Houghton at the Globe made the character sharper and more nervous than usual, suggesting Lady Macbeth’s obvious mental illness in the sleeping scene and blood washing in Act 5 (“out of the damned spot, out!”) that she had an earlier start, perhaps with the death of her child.
After the disastrous dinner party attended by the dead Banquo, Tennant delivers the lines “Come, we’ll to sleep” and “We’re young but in action” to his wife with the implication that they might conceive another child. that night. But Jumbo blanks him and heads towards what appears to be a separate bedroom. In the brutal denouement, Tennant hugs Young Siward and seems tempted to adopt him before giving the baby the ending the stage direction wants. Donmar’s program includes an essay on “postpartum depression” and, while sleeping, Jumbo holds a hand and places an imaginary/memory baby’s head on it.
So the drama that was previously seen as a political/marriage psychodrama is now seen as a parental tragedy.
What is the role of witches?
In the RSC’s Wils Wilson staging, the witches were clearly supernatural, emerging terrifyingly across the stage. At the Globe, they were very human or inhuman men in white forensic overalls at the scene of the crime, rotating autopsy juries around the stage to find each of the play’s eight bodies. Also serving as evil stage managers are the three sisters who stalk Fiennes, who are given exits and entrances unimagined by Shakespeare, unnervingly watching their prophecies play out.
Perhaps Tennant’s prophetic voices are only in his mind – unseen, they mutter and laugh over sound designer Gareth Fry’s binary backing track played through the headphones worn by the audience.
Can the Porter scene ever work?
Directors and scholars often worry about the second scene of Act 3 when the Porter of Hell-Gate comes forward, after Duncan’s murder, for a comic scene about who is sent to damnation (Catholics) and the effects of drinking. excessive. on urination and erections. The sudden change in tone and authorship is perhaps difficult to integrate into a linear tragedy that was suddenly thin.
Throughout these productions, Porter’s handling ranges from cutting the scene and part entirely (Godwin’s production, adapted by Emily Burns) to hiring Stewart Lee to write topical new material, including jibes at Boris Johnson and hedge funders, for comedian Alison Peebles. to perform at the RSC, or Jatinder Singh Randhawa improvising the text at the Donmar, with jokes about Suella Braverman and a dispute with a usher trying to remove him from the auditorium.
Problem Act 3, Scene 5, Line 26
Among the ingredients that the witches throw into his cauldron is “the liver of the blaspheming Jew”. Long-standing problems – the RSC’s version, which opened in August, was removed as part of a further six-line reduction of the witch’s brewery – were made even worse by the conflict that arose from the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Palestinian Hamas. At the Globe, a Witch pointed at a junior viewer and said “the liver of a child like you”. In the ETT, Fiennes and Tennant versions, the ingredient was cut.
Which Macbeth is king?
Each of them speaking the verse impeccably, the two superstars in the motion part contrasting master classes in classical acting – Fiennes expressive and sonorous, Tennant approved by the close mics that feed our headphones to internalize the crisis of the character, whispering some lines. At the RSC, Joseph was also notable for verbal power and the author of the Globe’s Bennett made the bold (and timely) choice to make the person he knows from the start unfit for power, and, for ETT, Noble skewered the cocky humor. which separates the politics of real life.
But it is the last of the five to open that takes the crown. Theses programs of the sold-out Tennant-Jumbo production end at 4.30pm. At that time, people were already queuing, on a freezing December evening, to return to the evening show.
