Seeing
Shakespeare on stage began for me back in graduate school at Boston University
as a student studying the texts. One of my professors arranged for some film
versions to be screened locally. Orson Welles played Falstaff in a version of
the Henrys. Roman Polanski made a 'Macbeth' that was too Hollywood or just too
weird. Then a theater in Boston began offering some Shakespeare plays: 'The
Tempest.' 'As You Like It.' We saw a 'King Lear' at one of the college theaters.
Even with a twenty-something in the role of the doomed king, who failed to become
wise before he became old, seeing Lear live was a scary good experience.
We began to
make a regular thing of it. We discovered Shakespeare & Company, a
then-new company performing in the woods outside the Edith Wharton estate in
Lenox. We saw a Macbeth with a young actor in the lead whose New York accent
got in the way of the play's Scots ambience. Still, the show had a grip on the
audience, including our daughter who cried in the end when Macbeth dies. She
was five, I think (what kind of parent brings a 5-year-old to a Shakespearean
tragedy?) and though unable to follow all of the play's ins and outs
(especially the notion that
Macbeth was responsible for most of the bloodshed) her reaction
caught the paradox of tragedy. It's hard to not to identify, to go along some way, with a
tragic hero.
It's impossible
not to care about Ross MacDonald's Macbeth in the Old Colony Shakespeare
Company's ongoing production at the Spire in Plymouth. He's set up by fate. 'Oh, I am fortune's fool!' he might wail, as
does Romeo in his play. And the set-up is more than the ominous, though tempting
foretelling of the infamous 'three witches.'
At the
play's start, Macbeth is returning from battle, having put down a bloody
rebellion against the king. Brave soldiers, military heroes, come back from the
wars throughout the centuries, but do they come back to what they were before? Or does the trauma of violence 'start a spirit' (to use an Elizabethan phrase) inside them? -- especially in
the days when being a war survivor meant coming back with blood on your
sword.
As
MacDonald plays the part, Macbeth's loyal-soldier hinge comes loose right from
the start. He is far too interested in the weird sisters' prophecies. When they
say 'and king thou wilt be,' the words are dark music to his ears. Perhaps a
crown would make poetic justice of the slaughter he's just committed on the
king's enemies.
And if a
crazy, blood-born notion has been externalized by the witches' prophecy so that
the war-hero must face it, the Macbeths' marital dynamic doubles down on the desperate
gamble of usurping a throne by 'foul' means. Lady Macbeth is the dark lady of
Shakespeare's tragic women. In fact the strength of Shakespeare's female
characters throughout his opus may be one piece of his genius that's still
under-appreciated. In play after play, it's the women who drive the action. In 'Romeo
and Juliet' it's Juliet who says, 'well if you're really serious, show up tomorrow
and we'll get married.' Female characters impel the action in all the 'romantic
comedies' as well. In Macbeth, it's the hero's lady who says 'if you really
want and need to be the top man in Scotland, let's not just sit around
wishing.'
But the
play is Shakespeare's critique of vitalism. Macbeth has more energy, and
certainly more poetry, than any of the other characters. But evil choices, as
his sad tale shows, reduce even the best of men to the banality of the tyrant. Still,
even as he degrades himself to gangster status, rubbing out the competition, Macbeth
becomes the supreme poet of the banality of evil: " I
am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more/ Returning
were as tedious as go o'er."
That's the
tyrant's fate in a nutshell: killing people is tedious.
Bay Colony
director Neil McGarry has suggested that the husband-wife dynamic is also supercharged
for a reason only glanced at in the text. "I have given suck," Lady
Macbeth says at one point. Since the couple have no children now, the reasonable
inference is they have lost a child, and the death of a child is a lingering
trauma for parents. Lady M also pointedly raises the spectre of madness in
warning her husband not to think about certain things too much.
'Let's get
life back on track,' she may be thinking when her husband raises the witchery
of being king. 'If he wants to be king, well maybe that's the ticket. It stinks
to have to carve up a nice old man in your guest room but, hey, life is tough.'
It is tough. Lady M. falls prey to her own
warning and doesn't make it to the end of the play.
Watching a
brainy and energy-packed interpretation of one the English language's
masterpieces such as the show currently offered by Bay Colony Shakespeare Company is why
we keep going to the theater. So many good things call out for notice. The cast's
three witches (Poornima Kirby, Monica Giordano, Meredith Stypinski) offer
glorious, wild, physical nasty-joy. Stypinski also finds more to do with the
single speech of the darkly clownish 'porter' than one ever imagined was in
there. Eric Simpson as Lady M was all-in, matching MacDonald's visionary loosing
of the inner devils with a steely determination to fight a losing battle. And MacDonald's falling hero, summoning
his own demons, anticipates the consequences even as he commits the acts that
bring them on in a brilliant realization of one of literature's great
creations.
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