Patrick Stewart in Macbeth

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Last night I took my mother to see a mas­ter per­form­ance of this most dif­fi­cult of plays.

Macbeth:The Scot­tish play.

Lead actor, Patrick Stew­art, is magical; not just his deep fam­ous voice, but for an abil­ity to inject new life into words that are so well known the entire audi­ence could speak them along­side him in uni­son like the Lord’s Prayer. His read­ing of the char­ac­ter of Macbeth is amaz­ing, mes­mer­iz­ing and shock­ing in its depths of deceit and the lies you can tell any­one; except­ing your­self. How­ever, the true mon­sters of the mind infect all the char­ac­ters in this play and how they deal with them is the focus of the words. Hap­pily all the act­ors rise to the occa­sion with spark­ling per­form­ances and bril­liant real­isaitons, espe­cially Lady Macbeth and the fant­astic McDuff.

Act­ing aside, this setup of the stage should become the teach­ing guide on how to make one room work as mul­tiple loc­a­tions; use sound. The sound pro­duc­tion was simply per­fect. The some­times quiet move­ments of back­ground sound, or the jar­ring bursts punc­tu­at­ing moments, and often built into the actions of the play­ers such as chop­ping up meat. It all is focused towards build­ing some very real ter­ror to the point of hor­ror. The single set acts as a train, din­ning room, kit­chen, dun­geon, bed cham­ber, bat­tle­field and more with only a few chairs and two tables in dif­fer­ent pos­i­tions to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them. This is all per­formed with a bal­let like artistry that means one loc­a­tion almost morphs into another in a blink of an eye. One second you are watch­ing a murder on a train and the next, the chairs have sub­tlety been moved a few feet and we are seated for din­ner in castle Macbeth. Truly a mas­ter­class and worth watch­ing for this alone. The styl­ing of pla­cing the play in a 1950’s, semi Stalin-esk world worked won­der­fully, as did bring­ing the usu­ally super-over-hammed speeches of the witches into the set­ting by hav­ing the char­ac­ters played by young girls and speak­ing at unusual speeds;

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

becom­ing almost a rap. Also, the script had not been bent at all to achieve this. For example, it was quite some­thing to see Macbeth call for his armour and receive a flack jacket!

MACBETH

I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack’d.
Give me my armour.

SEYTON

‘Tis not needed yet.

MACBETH

I’ll put it on.

All of this visual and aural splendor could only be achieved by someone who has a very clear love and intim­ate under­stand­ing of the text. Without this, con­tex­tu­al­ising in such a way would have bumped against the words some­thing awful.

Finally comes the play’s script itself. Shakespeare’s col­lec­ted works are the most over-analysed col­lec­tion of writ­ings since the Bible. To save you the trouble of wad­ing through the mor­ass of com­ment on this play, suf­fice to say that it has some lines in it that were polit­ic­ally charged for the view­ers at the time (James I espe­cially, who was no stranger to mad­den­ing Scot­tish tales of blood, given his moth­ers life) and there­fore they fail to make much sense to us now. How­ever; this bothered me not at all. Macbeth is a dark poem, a smoothly dan­cing night­mare of fall­ing. Of fall­ing deeper into the abyss by one’s own hand. It is highly oper­atic and as such you will not fail to under­stand the mean­ings of any part, even if you do not know all the ref­er­ences; as they are each nailed into your heart. This is a mas­ter­piece of hor­ror writ­ing with a build up to eternal dam­na­tion and the vil­lains final real­isa­tion of Nihil­ism. Evil creeps up on you through your fears. Truly Yoda was right about that one; once you start down the dark path, forever will it dom­in­ate your des­tiny. Macbeth’s final fear comes home to roost in the fam­ous soliloquy:

SEYTON

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH

She should have died here­after;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syl­lable of recor­ded time,
And all our yes­ter­days have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walk­ing shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Sig­ni­fy­ing nothing.

What does this pas­sage mean? End­less inter­pret­a­tions exist. Here is mine: Macbeth is say­ing that she should have died much later in life. The “dead” in “The queen, my lord, is dead” would have been a word that would have its nat­ural time and it is not now. I believe it is here that Macbeth faces the main part of the witches fate that he has been try­ing to avoid. The death of this wife means that, as he feared, he would not have chil­dren to take the crown. In this moment his life’s mean­ing has col­lapsed and all that he has wrought has been for noth­ing. He tells us as much earlier, using it as the jus­ti­fic­a­tion of killing Banquo:

MACBETH

…They hail’d him father to a line of kings:
Upon my head they placed a fruit­less crown,
And put a bar­ren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench’d with an unlin­eal hand,
No son of mine suc­ceed­ing. If ‘t be so,
For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind;
For them the gra­cious Duncan have I murder’d;
Put ran­cours in the ves­sel of my peace
Only for them; and mine eternal jewel
Given to the com­mon enemy of man,
To make them kings, the seed of Ban­quo kings!…

Being “fruit­less” is Macbeth’s great fear, and indeed all King’s fears. Thus at this point is he undone by his wife’s death and it shat­ters his mind. This tally’s for me to his reac­tions later, when in com­bat, he keeps repeat­ing the final witches taunt­ing clue; that he can­not be killed by a man born of women.

Macbeth in these brief lines gives him­self to the proph­esy and real­ises that he is power­less to change it.

The guilty murders that he and his wife have com­mit­ted have reboun­ded upon them, because one can­not lie to one’s own mind and one can­not escape fate. The witches have taken away his freewill and this, of course, leads to pure Nihil­ism. How could it not? As ‘Big N’ said:

“…if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

This pro­duc­tion scores a pure and unadul­ter­ated 10/10 and must been seen to be believed. I eagerly await Ham­let next year!

Basho

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