The Teatr Słowackiego put on a performance of Tragedia Makbeta this last Saturday which made for an interesting cultural experience. The interpretation of the play was slightly loose and did not exactly follow the original Shakespeare. That much was evident from the performance itself, but I heard today that apparently the Shakespeare play is known only as "Makbet" or "Macbeth" in Polish, and the different title was a way of distinguishing the interpretation from the play itself.
Like many interpretations of Shakespeare I have seen over the years, this one suffered from an overdose of creativity. So many performances of The Bard's work have been put on that directors and theater companies strain to do something that hasn't been done before. This has reached such proportions that I think if a famous company were to put on a wholly straight version of Macbeth, in period dress, on a bare stage and with minimal changes to the script it would be hailed as something revolutionary.
What sorts of excessive creativity am I complaining about? The Weird Sisters (i.e. the witches) got transformed into the Andrews Sisters, with 30s and 40s-era costumes and songs to match. The play used videocameras extensively, projecting the recordings of said cameras onto a screen on top of the set. This was also used to enable conversations between a player on the stage and one waiting in the wings: significantly, we never see the murderers of Lady MacDuff and MacDuff Jr. on the stage itself. This videography was also used for asides. However, the cameras were also used for entirely unclear purposes, such as focusing on the chin of an actor giving a speech, focusing on the face of an actor whose back was turned to the house, use of cameras in low-light mode to enable the audience to see a grainy picture of action that was taking place when the stage lights were all off, or focusing on an ashtray that was simply sitting in the middle of a table during a dialogue. While some of this camera-work did have an interesting and desirable effect, that effect was overused. Furthermore, if the director intends to show the audience a view of the actor's chin, it helps if he has a good reason for doing so.
The interpretation was also notable for its surrealism. In the scene where the witches give him those two famous guarantees, Macbeth puts on a tuxedo yet continues to wear the paratrooper boots he has on throughout the play. My companion that evening astutely pointed out that costuming, staging, and other elements were an odd hodgepodge of a number of historical eras and styles. The setup of the dinner scene, at which Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo, was accompanied by an alto singing "Where have all the flowers gone?" in German. The porter gave a 10-15 minute standup routine, and led the house in a known Polish song before being essentially forced off the stage by Ross and Banquo. Fleance (Banquo's kid) has a much larger role in this play than I remember, and while the director clearly intended to show that Banquo loved his son very much, the fact that the actor playing Banquo looked to be in his 20s and Fleance a teenager made this interaction seem downright bizarre. MacDuff was presented as a half-comical character. Malcolm, however, was handled in an interesting manner, as it was implied that his reign would likely be little better than that of Macbeth.
The performance's central faults were ones of excess as well as dragging pace. The entire play took about 3 hours from start to finish, and Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shorter plays. The excessive use of bells and whistles came at the expense of the text and dialogue itself. Lady Macbeth was particularly guilty of exaggeration: she seemed half-crazed throughout, which takes away from one of the central characteristics of the play, namely the humanization of a character initially presented as heartless, calculating, and entirely without redeeming features. The final breakdown of Lady Macbeth was similarly disappointing. The character came out on stage, struck matches, made some gurgling noises, and walked off in a manner that was almost funny. The death of Macbeth had a deliberately humorous treatment that just didn't seem quite appropriate and also made MacDuff's character seem entirely inconsistent. In this interpretation, MacDuff wanted Macbeth to surrender and killed the title character almost by accident. MacDuff then stumbled around the stage for a few minutes, the ghost of Lady MacDuff comes on stage, MacDuff hollers "sing! sing!" and the ghost does, the curtain falls....and MacDuff appears in the next scene carrying Macbeth's head? The character is made totally inconsistent in this way.
Lest I be accused of focusing too much on the negative, there were some aspects of this production that were excellent. The lighting of Lady Macbeth in her final scene was superb: it made it appear that she had blood on her face and body. The addition of a bit more humor into this play was welcome. Some of the bells and whistles and surrealism was wholly appropriate, considering that this is a play involving apparitions, changes in the natural order, witches etc. etc. I actually kind of like the idea of the ghost of Lady MacDuff appearing after Macbeth is killed, though doing so in a traditional staging is difficult as Macbeth dies off-stage. In a weird way, I could almost see playing MacDuff as a half-comical character who sobers up suddenly. And of course, Agnes, Ross and Caithness can easily be condensed into one character. The bottom line is, though there were some interesting innovations in this play, I only wish there were fewer of them.
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