Macbeth (23 page)

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 suddenly turned all the lights out, including the exit signs, so there was total blackout, we discovered that people have a very primal attitude to darkness. I once did Peter Shaffer’s
Black Comedy
at the Donmar. The play opens with the very interesting convention that the lights don’t go on and you hear the characters talking as if they’re in full light, and then suddenly all the lights go on and the characters continue the rest of the play as if they are in total darkness. At the first preview I made sure there was a total blackout and stood at the back of the auditorium to make sure that nobody came in and broke it. Within a minute or two a lady scuttled up the aisle and banged into me, trying to get out because she couldn’t tolerate the darkness. I thought if that can happen in a sixties’ light comedy, perhaps I ought to use it for
Macbeth
!

So for the first scene we suddenly went to blackout and, after people had got over their initial shock, it was a very eerie experience. We then heard the witches talking in the darkness. When you see the witches for the first time people often think, “Oh, so that’s how they’re doing the witches.” The fact that you couldn’t see them gave the scene a real intensity. It made you really listen to it. In the early previews we dropped in three little amplifiers at exactly the height where the witches would have been standing. The actors were backstage
and their voices came through via microphone. Then when they said “Hover through the fog and filthy air,” we flew out the amplifiers over the audience’s heads, so that what you thought was the voice of a woman in front of you suddenly flew over your head. But it was so freaky, and people became so disturbed by it, only a minute or two into the play, that we decided it was too much.

I think as always with Shakespeare part of what we were trying to do was surprise people: make them think that something was what they thought it was and then suddenly it was not. The whole back wall of the Swan was in fact a fake back wall. Everybody knew the Swan, it looked like the wall of the Swan, but when we came to the apparition scene suddenly the apparitions pushed through the wall. The wall had sections which were painted and textured like brick, but were actually made of wetsuit material, so that when the actors pushed their faces into it they came through the wall. Something solid suddenly became fluid. Then at the end of the banquet, just as Lady Macbeth left the stage with her candle, all of the other candles left on the table suddenly, magically, went out. In fact it was the witches, who had been hidden under the table through the entire scene, pulling the wicks down through the table. Then they threw the table up and appeared to the audience. It shocked them silly because the chairs went flying and the banquet table suddenly flew into the air. We then went straight on into the next scene where Macbeth visits the witches.

We took all those moments and tried genuinely to work out how you frighten an audience, and how to create the equivalent effect that Shakespeare suggests for a skeptical modern audience.

Goold:
I always felt the key to the supernatural was less in finding a modern correlative than in playing up the political world in which the play operates. Ghosts, witches, and visions are fearsome in their own right, but what makes them terrifying is when they prey on the minds of political figures in positions of power. They are manifestations of political crisis as much as a paranormal worldview, so we just always tried to ground and make detailed the paranoid police state that Scotland becomes in the play and that seemed to make the supernatural all the more shocking.

More specifically, the weird or “weyard” sisters have been variously played as old hags, classical Fates, alluring nymphs, and many interpretations in-between: how did you and your cast set about realizing them?

Nunn:
It was very important in our production that “the witches” were entirely believable, not just to Macbeth but to everybody in the audience. I think this production was the very first small-scale intimate staging of the play, to an audience of about two hundred, ranged on three sides of the action. It was also played without interval (whether that had been done before, I don’t know) so the black mass ritual meticulously observed by the three witches at the very beginning set up a disturbing atmosphere from which there was no escape until the glimmer of Christianity arrived like a fragile dawn at the end. The sisters were varied in age, a senior white-haired witch very much in control of the proceedings. A second witch, of an age to be her daughter, took instruction from the elder, but both of these were dependent on the third, who was young enough to be the third generation. She it was who became tranced, and provided each time the visionary or prophetic information. We redistributed the lines designated First, Second, and Third in the Folio so that each sister’s contribution was specific and in character, and so that we avoided generalized ghoulishness or choric posturing. They were individuals and they were believable.

Doran:
We decided that it’s the wrong way round with
Macbeth
to try and begin with the witches. It’s not a society terrorized by the witches. It’s a society which has produced the witches and made them scapegoats. It is interesting that the greatest witch persecutions have happened at times of civil crisis: during the Civil War, for example. There is the sense that at such times we require these targets to give vent to our national fears. The weyard sisters became for us a product of the fear already existing in society, rather than something that was making that society afraid. The way we tried to do that was to look at the weyard sisters from their point of view. I rehearsed them separately from the rest of the play, so that whenever we rehearsed their scenes I would work with the weyard sisters beforehand and we would decide how they would play the scene, but
we wouldn’t tell the other actors. We tried one idea that the witches couldn’t speak until they were asked a question, and they needed Macbeth to ask them that question. Then when he addressed them they could reveal their understanding of the future to him. The problem was that Banquo then asked the question as well, and they also had to tell him the future, which messed up their plan. Other days we tried other aspects of the witches: their vindictiveness; or perhaps their heightened sexuality; or we would try exploring the idea that they were high on drugs. But the other actors never know the route the witches had taken; the weirdness of the way they performed was all that was apparent to them. That meant that they remained this outside group. In rehearsal we never called them witches. Other people did, but they referred to themselves as the weyard sisters. We took their own personal agendas very seriously, so that they were real people, with real appetites.

The strangeness of the witches of course keeps the play ticking with this terrible undertow of fear. We had them make one or two extra appearances. At the moment when Banquo and Fleance are attacked by robbers while out riding, we had the witches silently watching. Right at the end of the play we see Malcolm become king. But of course the witches tell Banquo that his offspring will become king, so we finished the play with Fleance arriving with one of the trinkets that he had found from the witches, and clearly thinking “My time will come.” So there was this sense of an endless cycle of violence and retribution.

Goold:
The sisters are by far the hardest thing to get right in the play, not least because they dominate the opening act, and yet their second scene, with the tale of the pilot and his wife, is impenetrable, extraneous, and poorly written (probably by Middleton). I longed to cut it, but the witches have to establish themselves if they are to resonate, so a solution has to be found. I took inspiration from Wes Craven, who said he came up with Freddy Krueger by thinking about when people felt safest and then threatening that (sleep, in the case of
A Nightmare on Elm Street
). For most sensibilities a neutral watchful chorus of blank Norns [in Norse myth, the three goddesses of fate] is attractive, but the problem with the witches is that they just
have to be evil, petty, and vicious—the text only supports that reading. For a variety of reasons I hit on the idea of them being nurses—again, people we trust and look to in times of need and custodians of life and death in most people’s lives, so more problematic if they are evil. Nurses would also be needed in the warfare of the first act and so would fit in unnoticed around a battlefield. That was something very important to me; I had always felt the first act of the play can be very bitty in performance—the leaping locations, the complexity of the civil war backstory, and the sheer challenge of the language in the opening scenes can all make the play hard to get into. I had a hunch that creating two long opening scenes, one in a field hospital and the next in the kitchen of Glamis castle, would give the piece a slower, more monumental growth and then allow the play’s action to accelerate from Act 3 on. I also think it is a mistake to have the witches ever-present, which is what blights so many fringe and regional productions where the witches have to double as everything from Fleance to the various doctors. While this can have moments of seeming insight, most of the time it is both distracting and robs the witches of part of their power: that we meet them so rarely and yet with such amazing force each time we do. So, to return to our production, I interpolated the witches’ first scene at the exit of the bloody sergeant for surgeons. The sergeant, who had been attended throughout by the three nurses trying to minister to his wounds, found himself alone with his angels not of mercy but of death. They killed him, his part in their story served, and then removed their surgical masks to ask when they would meet again. A manipulative revision, but
Macbeth
is such a well-known play and the opening scene such a familiar cliché that I hoped our surprise relocation would make an audience listen harder rather than sit back and listen to the familiar thunderclaps and cackling. The final bonus of the nurses idea was in the very British desire to see our hospital sisters as sexually provocative, and I’m sure Shakespeare had that in mind when he wrote the weyard sisters.

Just after the murder of Duncan is discovered, Macbeth makes a slip that almost implicates him, but attention is distracted by the line “Look to the lady”—what’s happening here? Does Lady Macbeth
faint or pretend to faint (how could an audience tell the difference?) or could she throw up or do something else?

Nunn:
Unquestionably, Lady Macbeth is the better of the two at handling the immediate aftermath of the murder, and so we made it clear that her “fainting” was a vitally necessary device to prevent the questioning of her husband from going any further. However, something entirely unforeseen changes her ability to handle such situations; her husband begins to exclude her from his thoughts and plans, and so, at the very time when she feels they most need each other, he rejects her, one senses for the first time, in their intense marital relationship. So what we watch in the middle reaches of the play is not only the creation, step by step, of a tyrant dictator, but even more upsettingly, the breakup of a marriage.

Doran:
I believe that Lady Macbeth faints. I don’t think it’s a ploy to distract from her husband. She doesn’t really rescue him from his mistake because suspicion is still clearly focused towards him. It’s the moment that the reality of what Lady Macbeth has done suddenly happens upon her, and she passes out. I think it is at that point that Macbeth ceases to trust her and begins to use her, and so it is a crucial point. I think the enormity of the crime as it is described brings back the image of her dead father and she isn’t able to deal with it, or with the accumulated pressure from events around her.

Goold:
As you say, the difference is impossible for the audience to detect, but we played it as a genuine faint. We went with the idea that Macbeth, as a soldier, would know how to kill Duncan—a quick stab or two to the vital organs—and that the “gashed stabs” he describes are inflicted by the bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth when she returns the daggers. So in our production he entered from the murder with only a few streaks of blood on his hands but when she returned she looked like she had been bathing in an abattoir. His speech then, which precipitates the faint, was played as an accusation in part to her for her violence, which he has only just witnessed with Lennox. That became the start of his active separation from her and precipitated the faint along with Lady Macbeth being forced to re-see the murder through his description. We also played the second of Banquo’s “Look to the lady” as an aside and warning to Macduff. He is trying to tell the Thane of Fife that he suspects Lady Macbeth may be at the root of the crime.

6. and 7. Contrasting approaches to the weyard sisters: taking control of Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn’s 1976 production (top) and as sinister nurses with Patrick Stewart in Rupert Goold’s 2007 production.