The most common and plausible one is that many believe that Shakespeare wrote in real spells and incantations used by witches into the play. Well, there are a few theories about the origin of this superstition. They’ll often refer to it as “The Scottish Play” or “MacBee”, and will refer to the character of Macbeth as “The Scottish King”. It’s a common superstition among the acting community that it’s bad luck to mention Macbeth by name while inside a theater when the play is not being held. More famous than the play itself, perhaps, is the fabled curse surrounding it. No matter how many times Shakespeare seems intent on proving me wrong.Kenneth Branagh as Macbeth in his adaption of Shakespeare’s Macbeth Macbeth – the famed “Scottish Play” – is one of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies. Outside the theatre I can dislike Macbeth as much as I like, but as soon as I step inside a theatre as a critic I have to believe that thi s will be the one. But despite my cynicism about criticism, the act of being a critic is forever an act of hope. And if it is, we want everyone to know.Īm I ever going to have that experience with Macbeth? I doubt it. Even when seeing hundreds of shows a year, it would be folly to think these experiences might come around more than a handful of times in a lifetime – but every show could be the next one. The reason we are theatre critics is not because we think all performance is great, but because we believe in the steadfast capacity for theatre to be transcendental. Perhaps this is useful: in the absence of any dramatic differentiation, you can measure how much longer you have to sit there quite neatly by counting how many people are left to be killed.Īnd yet however much I scorn Macbeth, I’ll keep going back. It reminded me, too, that there is little in the way of a narrative arc – just a steadily growing pile of bodies. The latest production, unfortunately, has done little to change my mind. There is no one to root for, but there is little to root against, and the play just gets subsumed in a not particularly interesting form of misery. While Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have the potential to be compelling antiheroes, too often I’ve seen actors drown under the weight of their characters. The play itself is too bleak, too unrelenting. There was Macbeth set in a jail where the witches gathered around a toilet the Macbeth where I excitedly thought “out damned spot!” would be told via contemporary dance, before I realised we’d just been victim to an incongruous sound cue the production where the stage blood just made it look like everyone had their period. Since then, it’s been downhill in Dunsinane. It was less about Macbeth and more about making Macbeth less about Shakespeare and more about the notion of young artists playing with theatre and performance itself. Instead of blood we had yellow paint balls instead of darkness there was laughter. Sets caught on fire, the fake dagger was swapped for a real one, the wheels on rolling sets weren’t locked and actors went careening across the stage. Everything that went wrong in the rehearsal room – supposedly – made its way to the stage, and some added homage to the curse besides. Playing off the reportedly cursed nature of the play, the production, Vs Macbeth, irreverently played with the script, adding in a litany of errors to the work. My first Macbeth in 2010, from the Sydney Theatre Company and independent Adelaide outfit The Border Project, started things so well. But it’s also about Shakespeare’s text itself: his unrelenting exploration of masculinity with women shoved off to the side (I’ve yet to see a production convincingly argue that Lady Macbeth is indeed an interesting role for women), and the irrelevance of a story about royal lineage and power from a country on the other side of the world. My problem, of course, rests largely with a series of unfortunate productions and their shared composition of fake stage blood, dissonance electronic scores, industrial designs, dirty T-shirts. According to AusStage, a database of Australian theatre, Macbeth is the most performed Shakespearian play in Australia, beating Romeo and Juliet by some measure.Īll of this is to say: if I’m going to spend my time working as a theatre critic, I am going to have to spend a lot of it with Macbeth.
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