Macbeth and His Problems
porticoquarterly.com
porticoquarterly.com
What’s important and complex in Shakespeare plays, is not what it’s written, but what’s left to the interpretation of the director, or even of the public — the ambiguities, the imperfections, that let us imagine the motivations of the characters (as the article points - the motives are clear but not the motivations), and let us perceive their emotions, feel their reactions, mixed with ours.
Exactly what generative AI doesn't let you do.
While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brought him news that Birnam Wood had moved, and he drew inspiration from every fiber of my being to deliver his "tale told by an idiot" spiel.
I can still feel the spit hitting my face!
It’s a role that, under a conscientious actor, demands attention and introspection years (decades) after the curtain drops.
The crowd loved the short five-night run, last time. It made all the papers, tickets sold out, tourists rocked up for it.
Seven actors were injured, in a space that usually saw one injury a year. Six were ruled unavoidable by the fire warden doing the post-assessments.
Or this is a joke on the “curse”?
There are some scenes in Macbeth that can be turned into offstage fighting if the director wants to minimize risk to the actors; for example, the battle with Macdonwald (not a typo) in Act 1 Scene 2 is reported to King Duncan, but not seen onstage in most productions. (Though an ambitious director might choose to have a mass battle depicted during the transition from Scene 1 to Scene 2, then have the combatants leave when Duncan walks onstage to hear the report). But there are three scenes that explicitly call for an onstage fight:
Act 3, Scene 3: three hired killers attack Banquo and his son; Banquo is killed but the son manages to escape. This all happens onstage.
Act 5, Scene 7: Macbeth fights young Siward, and kills him.
Act 5, Scene 8: Macbeth fights Macduff, and it's a long fight. They fight once, pause to exchange some words while both are gasping for breath, then they fight again. The stage directions call for them to exit the stage still fighting, then come back onstage still fighting, just in time for the audience to see Macduff kill Macbeth.
With three swordfights that must happen onstage, the potential for accidents is a lot higher than for most of Shakespeare's plays.
On the other hand, Romeo and Juliet has a similar number of fights, as does Hamlet — yet neither of them has acquired the same reputation. So it's also possible that there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here: actors who are worried about getting hurt might not have their full attention on the fight choreography, making them more prone to make mistakes that do actually result in injury.
P.S. Now for the funny story I mentioned. If you haven't seen The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye as the protagonist and Basil Rathbone as the villain, go watch it; it's hilarious, and it deserves to be more widely-known than it is. In the final swordfight between Kaye's character and Rathbone's, the fight ranges all over the castle, and for plot reasons, Kaye's character is alternating between fighting expertly, and making wild, amateurish swings with no skill at all. Thing is, Rathbone was an expert fencer, and helped teach Kaye (who had no fencing experience) how to fight. Now, usually in a swordfight scene, they would substitute a stuntman to double for the actor when the actor's face isn't visible. But in the scenes where Kaye's face is visible and Rathbone's isn't, it's still Basil Rathbone doing the fighting — because Kaye was so inexperienced that he was likely to make mistakes, and Rathbone didn't want anyone less experienced than himself facing an inexperienced actor in a dangerous fight scene. (In fact, if you have a lot of experience with fight choreography, you can probably spot the times when Kaye came very close to actually hitting Rathbone for real, and if Rathbone had been less experienced he might very well have been injured).
Spoilers!
I was just about to go see my middle school’s production of Macbeth hoping to see some violence but now it’s ruined!
So that fact alone might help explain why injuries tend to be higher in stage productions of Macbeth. It's just inherently more dangerous to perform than the rest of Shakespeare's plays.
But I want to know more
Ones I remember:
- Opening night, actress slipped on a stair, and fractured her ankle.
- Mirror in the changerooms had its hook break (warden said internal manufacturing defect, could not be seen ahead of time), and smashes an actor in the head. Concussion.
- A door jammed after the weather changed. Someone tried to open it without realising, and dislocated their shoulder. (200 year old building.)
This happens in my thirty year old house! The more things change, the more they stay the same!
Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most popular play, cause it’s got sex and blood and poetry all over, a really tight plot, and it’s not too long. It is pretty well guaranteed to fill a theatre. Also, every actor knows the script so you can find a cast in no time.
So if your current play is not selling a lot of tickets and is about to be cancelled, the theatre is going to put on Macbeth right after you to try to make its money back quickly. That’s why thespians hate to hear the name ‘Macbeth’ — because if there’s talk of that play going about, you could be out of a job next week.
Reciting lines from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream is also rumored to be helpful (from the last section).
"For the more athletically inclined, one should exit the theatre, spin around in a circle three times, and spit."
https://broadwaydirect.com/13-theater-superstitions-hallowee...
But basically I don't think those problems are all meant to be solved
Yes, the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups. And that's kind of the point
There is always a tension between what is seen and spoken in that play. We're meant to get the sense that Macbeth is partly talking himself into his frenzy
Supernatural events happen but they kind of have a bathetic, eye-rolling quality to them, like the prophecy that "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him"
Which YEAH, it does, in that Macbeth's enemies construct a bunch of battering rams from the forest timber. You are supposed to groan at that. Magic is way weaker than any of the human beings and their ordinary vices
Speaking generally, as a former theatre professional, using onstage "effects" is less effective than firing the audience's imagination, and inviting them to do the work - which, of course, Jacobean artists were well able to do, and their audiences arguably more prepared to accept. The best plays - and I do think Maccers is among them, although the three productions of it I've been in were mediocre to dire - give huge scope for that.
This was a wonderful article, that nails what's wonderful - and frustrating - about the show.
My memory might be failing but I thought it was that the soldiers were disguising their movements using branches cut from the trees so it gave the impression that the trees themselves were moving towards Macbeth's castle.
It's been on my mind a lot, how I've lost touch with all this
I’ll see myself out.