Designing Macbeth
It is Macbeth’s metaphysical dilemma which is the crucial focus for
director, Adrian Noble, and designer, Ian MacNeil.
This emphasis upon the central character gave them a very simple starting
point for their production. As Ian
MacNeil explains, “Ours is not a conceptual production—it doesn’t start
with an intellectual concept about a play.
It is built around the actor playing the leading role—Derek Jacobi
playing Macbeth—that’s the starting point.
The idea of my design is to reinforce Derek’s particular qualities as
an actor.
“Derek is brilliant at
taking you right inside someone’s head and exploring their deepest thoughts
and emotions.
I think the set helps us to do that.
Its dark, interior quality allows the production to focus upon what is
private and metaphysical in the central character.”
Picking
up on the play’s constant references to darkness, Ian has taken a dark
interior as the starting point of his set design.
“Basically the set is a black box, occasionally illuminated by shafts
of light or flashes of color.”
The
black set means that when color is introduced it has a far greater impact. Lady
Macbeth’s first entrance in a crimson dress, the sumptuous banquet to greet
Duncan’s arrival at Dunsinane, the dripping blood on the hands of Macbeth and
his wife, the Witches’ supernatural pageant, the verdant colors of the scene
in England, stand out strikingly amidst the producer’s brooding darkness.
With
the costumes Ian felt that simplicity was the key.
“If you are asking actors to have real emotions you can create a
barrier for them if you costume them too much.
Elaborate costumes can look wonderful, but it helps the actors more if
the clothes can be rather more ordinary. I’ve
gone for simple costumes, but ones which are slightly romanticized.”
To reinforce this slightly romantic feel Ian has drawn upon
Pre-Raphaelite ideas of mediaeval costume.
“The men wear a sort of nineteenth century idea of mediaeval armour—like
you see in pictures by Burne Jones. So
it’s slightly romanticized, but strong as well.
A sort of male grace.”
Twentieth
century directors and actors tend not to re-write Shakespeare to this extent.
However Shakespeare’s text is often cut or adapted to allow Macbeth’s dying
moments to take place in front of the audience.
Adrian Noble’s current RSC production is no exception.
Piers
Ibbotson (Assistant Director) explains that “Adrian has rearranged much of the
play’s ending so that the audience is able to follow the main character from
his ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech (Act V, Scene 5) right
through to his death—the tension and momentum never falters.” Piers
believes that the convention of Macbeth dying on stage is partly to do with
changing perceptions of violence. “For
Elizabethan audiences the sight of a severed head on stage would have had a
horrifying effect. The sight of
severed heads on Traitors’ Gate was a relatively familiar chilling one.
For twentieth century audiences a severed head tends to make us think of
horror movies.”
But
the death of Macbeth is no less horrific because it takes place on stage. Derek
Jacobi’s Macbeth embraces his death willingly, in what becomes almost an act
of suicide—the final blow is a self-inflicted one on the words, “Hold,
enough!”
Usually for Shakespeare’s heroes Macbeth is killed off stage—this
head is brought in and held aloft by the victorious McDuff.
However, directors and actors have often adapted Shakespeare’s text to
allow the hero to die in front of his audience.
Productions
of Macbeth in the 17th and 18th century usually supplied
Macbeth with a specially-written death-bed speech.
David Garrick, the eighteenth century actor who played the role from 1744
until 1768, added a speech in which Macbeth acknowledged his guilt and expressed
his fears of the after-life:
“’Tis done! The
scene of life will quickly close.
Ambition’s vain delusive dreams are fled,
And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror;
I cannot bear it! let me shake it
off –
It will not be; my soul is clogg’d with blood –
I cannot rise! I dare not ask for
mercy –
It is too late, hell drags me down; I sink,
I sink, - my soul is lost for ever!
Oh! – Oh!”
Interpreting the Text
Adrian Noble, director of the current RSC production of Macbeth, has cut
approximately 140 lines from the text, and has rearranged the order of some
scenes and events in the play. The
main reason for these slight adaptations is to tighten up the timescale of the
play.
Piers Ibbotson (Assistant
Director) explains the thinking which lies behind these amendments to the text: “Adrian
Noble wanted above all to focus upon the journey which Macbeth takes throughout
the play. All the cuts and amendments to the text are made with this in
mind—to speed the forward momentum of the narrative, and to enable the
audience to follow Macbeth’s story more easily.”
This decision to focus tightly upon Macbeth’s story means, for
instance, that Macbeth becomes a shadowy background figure at the murder of Lady
Mcduff and her children, witnessing the slaughter which he has commanded; and
that, in a powerful juxtaposition, the Witches present their pageant of
apparitions to Macbeth at the very banqueting table where Banquo’s ghost has
just appeared.
At
about 2,100 lines, Macbeth is one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, and
the decision is often made for it to be played without an interval.
Piers explains that “the interval is traditionally taken after the
killing of Mcduff’s wife and children. Cutting
the interval maintains the momentum of the story and takes the audience from the
brutal murder of Macduff’s family straight into witnessing Macduff’s
reaction to the news. It casts the
England scenes in a wholly different light.”
Other
interpretative decisions are intended to make the development of the story
clearer for the audience. Adrian
Noble (Director) has, for instance, decided to include Banquo’s son, Fleance,
on stage for several of the early court scenes, even though his presence is not
specified in the text. Christopher
Ravenscroft (Banquo) feels that this can be very helpful for an audience:
“Because Fleance is present on the stage the audience sees the child
and can understand more about his relationship with his father.
Fleance doesn’t then have to appear suddenly in one scene later on in
the play and assume a tremendous importance.”
This
type of production decision can also be beneficial to the actors.
Christopher explains: “What
I always do when preparing for a role is to invent quite a specific past history
for the character. With Fleance on
stage and relating to his father, it helps to give me a clear idea of who Banquo
is. It helps the character to exist
in three dimensions rather than just in two.”
The
text of Macbeth did not appear in print until after Shakespeare’s death. It
was published in the Folio of 1623, the first time Shakespeare’s plays were
collected together in one volume.
Throughout
the play’s performance history, actors and directors have adapted the Folio
text to meet the needs of their production and their audiences. Twentieth
century versions of Macbeth have included Kurosawa’s Japanese film version Throne
of Blood (1957), a production set in a concentration camp (Manchester Royal
Exchange 1988), and the Japanese director, Yukio Ninagawa’s 1985 stage
production which set the play amidst a snow storm of cherry blossom.
The radical interpretation of Shakespeare is not exactly a twentieth
century phenomenon.
The
first revival of Macbeth after the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 was in
1664 by Sir William Davenant’s company.
To meet the tastes of his audience Davenant made several drastic
alterations to Shakespeare’s script including:
-
expanding the role of Lady
Macduff so that she becomes a paragon of virtue directly contrasted to an evil
Lady Macbeth;
-
omitting the Porter entirely;
-
composing a special death-bed
speech for Macbeth;
-
adding a number of songs and
dances to be performed by the Witches.
Davenant’s
adaptation of Macbeth still held the stage in the early eighteenth century.
In 1708 John Downes, prompter from the 1664 production, wrote praising
the continued strength of the adaptation: “The
tragedy of Macbeth, altered by Sir William Davenant, being dressed in all its
finery, as new clothes, new scenes, machines, flyings for the Witches; with all
the singing and dancing in it . . . all excellently performed, being in the
nature of an opera, it recompenses double the expense; it proves still a lasting
play.”
The celebrated eighteenth century
actor, David Garrick, first played Macbeth in 1744 and continued in the role for
over twenty years. Carrick retained Davenant’s singing and dancing witches in
his productions, and wrote his own speech for the dying Macbeth.
Garrick, who costumed his Macbeth in the finery of an eighteenth century
gentleman, was criticized by some members of the audience for his modern dress
interpretation!
The most eminent actors throughout the centuries have tackled the leading roles
of Macbeth and his wife. During the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the central role was played by leading
actors including J.P. Kemble, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving.
In the twentieth century famous Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeths include a
1955 production with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, directed by Glen Byam
Shaw; Peter Hall’s 1967 production, starring Paul Schofield and Vivien
Merchant; and Trevor Nunn’s starkly-staged production at The Other Place in
1976, with Ian McKellen and Judy Dench. The
current RSC production is Adrian Noble’s third for the company, following
highly successful productions in 1986 and 1988.
Piers Ibbotson, the Assistant Director, feels that “the central
challenge in any production of Macbeth is finding a way to make the witches
work.”
Designer, Ian MacNeil, explains that
the play’s supernatural elements were crucial in determining the production’s
design and setting.
“We wanted to be very clear that this is a world in which people
believe that the supernatural actually exists; a world where witches and magic,
good and evil are a part of people’s lives.”
The production is permeated by
strong religious images which help to reinforce this central concept of good and
evil.
The Witches’ brew becomes a distorted holy communion, while the banquet
to celebrate Duncan’s arrival at Dunsinane, of which the audience is given a
fleeting glimpse, summons up ideas of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The
Last Supper, with all the sense of betrayal and blasphemy which that brings.
To help create a strong sense of the
supernatural, Ian MacNeil decided to make use of the RSC’s full technical
resources and to design a moving bridge which spans the whole stage and which
becomes the site for all of the play’s magical elements. As
Piers Ibbotson explains, “the bridge provides a physical manifestation of the
play’s hierarchy—it shows the witches, and later Banquo’s ghost, hovering
over the affairs of men.”
The play’s witchcraft and magic also pose a challenge for the actors.
Christopher Ravenscroft, who plays Banquo, feels it is crucial that the
characters can believe that the Witches truly are from another world:
“Macbeth is not the only one affected by the encounter with the Weird Sisters.
Banquo is himself extremely disturbed by the Witches’ prophecy.
During a very short scene with Fleance at night, Banquo hints at the
troubles he is undergoing:
‘A
heavy summons lies like lead upon me
And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers
Restrain
in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way
to in repose.’ (Act II, Scene 1)
I
think he’s haunted by what he’s heard.
He’s dreamed about the Witches, had nightmares about them and I think
he feels the temptation that he could somehow help the prophecy come true; help
his heirs to become kings. So from the start both he and Macbeth know that they’re
dealing with something that is supernatural and evil.
“It’s not difficult playing a
character with such a strong belief in the supernatural. I
mean, even in the twentieth century we’re still extraordinarily superstitious
ourselves, aren’t we?”
The concept of tyranny is one which
is crucial for our contemporary understanding of Macbeth. As
opposition to Macbeth’s rule begins to mobilize during the second half of the
play, the word “tyrant’ echoes through the text.
Ian MacNeil (Designer) believes that Macbeth’s unopposed rise to power is one
which can be easily comprehended in the twentieth century.
“We can think of any number of twentieth century figures like the
Macbeths—Nicolae and Elena Ceausecu in Romania for instance.”
Christopher Ravenscroft (Banquo) agrees that the play’s depiction of tyranny
is close to our own experience in the twentieth century.
“It’s quite interesting that people don’t believe that tyrants are
going to be as tyrannical as they are. They
feel that they are, deep-down, decent people.
The German politicians in 1932 and 1933 felt Hitler was getting out of
control but they didn’t believe he was as ruthless or as bright or as sharp as
he actually was. I think that’s
the case with Banquo—he doesn’t believe that Macbeth could be as bad, as
determined, and as ruthless as he really is.”
This sense of Macbeth’s essential charisma is crucial in understanding why the
people around him behave as they do. As
Christopher explains, “It seems important for the development of the play that
Macbeth must be an extraordinary personality who has achieved extraordinary
things in battle. So I think he
inspires great devotion and great love.”
“Banquo genuinely doesn’t feel that he’s in danger himself.
It’s extraordinary that he comes back to attend Macbeth’s banquet—he
should go straight away like Macduff does, but I think it’s an arrogance or a
naivety which makes him feel he is immune from Macbeth’s ambition.”
Amidst the bloodshed and tragedy of Macbeth the short comic scene of the drunken
porter is one which always sticks in the mind of the audience.
In the current RSC production the Porter is played by Neil Caple.
Neil believes that the role is “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to
do. I think it’s one of the hardest parts in Shakespeare.
I’ve played the two Dromios in THE COMEDY OF ERRORS and whereas that’s
a much bigger part, it’s a damn sight easier because the lines are totally
accessible.”
Neil feels that the role of the Porter was originally written as a comic turn.
“In Shakespeare’s time we believe the role may have been played by a
well-known local comedian. The
jokes are all topical ones—the kind of things people would have been laughing
about down the pub. The Porter
comes on and the play stops for him to do a turn—that’s how it was
originally written.”
So how does an actor in the 1990s make a speech filled with topical Elizabethan
jokes work for a modern audience? The
first step, according to Neil, is “to decide whether you’re going to make it
funny at all—some people don’t, some actors don’t play the comedy in it at
all. I feel strongly that you have
to trust the writing and go for the comedy.”
But while concentrating on the humor of the scene Neil was determined not to
attempt a comic turn. “I can’t do that kind of a turn.
I’m basically a straight actor, not a comedian.
My approach was to make it funny but to base that humor firmly upon a
character.”
To allow the Porter to develop as a more defined character the director, Adrian
Noble, has him appear frequently on stage as a servant in Macbeth’s household.
The Porter can be seen serving drinks on Duncan’s arrival at the
castle, attending on Macbeth at the fateful banquet, and crucially, packing his
bags and deserting Macbeth as the opposing army approaches Dunsinane.
As Neil explains, “all of this helps to give the Porter more of a
story.”
Neil believes that the Porter fulfills an important structural function in the
play.
“I have been very aware of where the Porter’s scene stands in
relation to the rest of the play. One
of the dramatic functions of the Porter is to sustain the intensity of the
drama. Throughout Macbeth
Shakespeare will set events in motion, but the next scene will be a digression
and we will only go back to the main events later.
If Macbeth had just murdered Duncan and then the murder was discovered
straight away then all that tension would have been lost. Having the Porter’s scene in between really keeps the
audience on the edge of their seats.”
In spite of the humor of the Porter’s scene a
sense of terror is never far away. To
reinforce this sense of fear “we have introduced the idea of the Porter seeing
a ghost, an apparition of some kind, coming from the very place where the dead
King lies. That is the moment when
the atmosphere turns; the moment when you have made people laugh and you can
then slap them across the face and bring them back to the terror of the play’s
main events.
