tyrant. That’s partly due to how he is haunted and how the play’s imagery supports that. He says, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” and “They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly,” as if he is some terrible bear chained to a stake and attacked by dogs. The imagery supports his status as almost a victim. You get a sense in performance that once he has realized the sin he has committed, his struggle to carry on living makes him worthy of our pity. And Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, where you see how much she is being punished by her own conscience, is a devastating portrayal of a human soul in disintegration.
Goold: History is written by the victors, and so in one sense that is all they are. One of the things the play seems to be exploring is the tension between social and political identity versus the individual psyche. However, in Lady Macbeth’s case I also always thought that it was important that she was, to a certain degree, a two-dimensional character—a “fiend-like queen.” It is her single-minded remorseless ambition that is set against Macbeth’s huge complexity. Too often I think great actresses try and give backstory or humanity to a woman who, while we can pity her hugely, never shows us she is more than a psychopath. It is that chilling viciousness that makes the part so iconic and so potent.
How did you invoke the sense of the supernatural for a modern audience who might be more skeptical about those aspects of the play than theatergoers would have been in Shakespeare’s day?
Nunn: My production dressed Duncan more as a priest than a military king, so that he had an iconic, rather papal aura which not only suggested a prevailing religious conformity in the social structure, but accentuated the heinous and unthinkable quality of the murder. Apart from that emphasis, there was very little of a hieratic nature in the presentation because extreme naturalistic credibility was the aim and intention of all that we did with a text rich in imagery, but equally daring in the use of slang, conversational rhythm, interrupted thought, and the vocabulary of domestic squabble. In The Other Place, it was possible to speak without projection, indeed to whisper and be heard by everyone, and this gave a sense for the audience not so much of being at a play as of overhearing conversations which put everybody present in equal danger. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were at the point of committing the murder of Duncan, I had placed all the other actors at vantage points invisibly around the theater, and asked them to breathe heavily, as if sleeping. The effect, of a silence so profound that people peacefully and innocently asleep in the house could be clearly heard, was genuinely gripping and terrifying, as well as prefiguring Macbeth’s nightmare that he will sleep no more, that he has murdered sleep. Ian McKellen andJudi Dench were quite extraordinary in their ability to observe the rules of the text but make exchanges like this seem totally naturalistic, almost improvised. This “experience” of sleep also connected to Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in her fitful confessional, which again we tried to make as real as if caught on a hospital CCTV camera.
Doran: I noticed that the word “fear” (and linked to it “afraid,” “fearsome,” “fearful”) is a very important theme in the play. At the beginning of rehearsals I got everybody in the company to describe a time when they had been really afraid: afraid for their safety, the safety of their children; afraid of spiders, heights, whatever. People described in detail their experiences of fear and we tried to tap into the reality of what that experience is: what it does to the human body; what it does to your breath; and how we could communicate that sense of fear.
In terms of how to get the audience to feel that fear, we decided very early to play the first scene—the very short scene with the three witches—in total darkness. When we
Goold: History is written by the victors, and so in one sense that is all they are. One of the things the play seems to be exploring is the tension between social and political identity versus the individual psyche. However, in Lady Macbeth’s case I also always thought that it was important that she was, to a certain degree, a two-dimensional character—a “fiend-like queen.” It is her single-minded remorseless ambition that is set against Macbeth’s huge complexity. Too often I think great actresses try and give backstory or humanity to a woman who, while we can pity her hugely, never shows us she is more than a psychopath. It is that chilling viciousness that makes the part so iconic and so potent.
How did you invoke the sense of the supernatural for a modern audience who might be more skeptical about those aspects of the play than theatergoers would have been in Shakespeare’s day?
Nunn: My production dressed Duncan more as a priest than a military king, so that he had an iconic, rather papal aura which not only suggested a prevailing religious conformity in the social structure, but accentuated the heinous and unthinkable quality of the murder. Apart from that emphasis, there was very little of a hieratic nature in the presentation because extreme naturalistic credibility was the aim and intention of all that we did with a text rich in imagery, but equally daring in the use of slang, conversational rhythm, interrupted thought, and the vocabulary of domestic squabble. In The Other Place, it was possible to speak without projection, indeed to whisper and be heard by everyone, and this gave a sense for the audience not so much of being at a play as of overhearing conversations which put everybody present in equal danger. When Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were at the point of committing the murder of Duncan, I had placed all the other actors at vantage points invisibly around the theater, and asked them to breathe heavily, as if sleeping. The effect, of a silence so profound that people peacefully and innocently asleep in the house could be clearly heard, was genuinely gripping and terrifying, as well as prefiguring Macbeth’s nightmare that he will sleep no more, that he has murdered sleep. Ian McKellen andJudi Dench were quite extraordinary in their ability to observe the rules of the text but make exchanges like this seem totally naturalistic, almost improvised. This “experience” of sleep also connected to Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in her fitful confessional, which again we tried to make as real as if caught on a hospital CCTV camera.
Doran: I noticed that the word “fear” (and linked to it “afraid,” “fearsome,” “fearful”) is a very important theme in the play. At the beginning of rehearsals I got everybody in the company to describe a time when they had been really afraid: afraid for their safety, the safety of their children; afraid of spiders, heights, whatever. People described in detail their experiences of fear and we tried to tap into the reality of what that experience is: what it does to the human body; what it does to your breath; and how we could communicate that sense of fear.
In terms of how to get the audience to feel that fear, we decided very early to play the first scene—the very short scene with the three witches—in total darkness. When we
Similar Books
