Vs Macbeth

First published on 5 Feb 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Shakespeare had many a royal reason to be nervous when writing and staging his Scottish history play, because James VI of Scotland was since 1603 also King of England. The politically cluey William changed James's ancestor Banquo from an accomplice in the murder of King Duncan into an innocent victim turned ghost. He also shortened and darkened the historical record of the long and peaceful reign of King Macbeth, and included for three witches a great deal of technical detail in a subject on which James I considered himself an expert: witchcraft. Having been elevated to the status of the King's Men, the Bard and his players now had a lot to lose by displeasing their patron, so the one surviving text shows patches of spin-doctoring, particularly in the tedious scenes now attributed to Thomas Middleton where Malcolm feigns claims of unsuitability for the crown.

But his actors must still have worried that putting a foot wrong could land them in their graves - which probably concentrated their minds about their conduct on stage. It is this kind of disturbed, alert intensity that the STC's collaboration with Adelaide's Border Project boldly reinstates in a play that has defined our concepts of witches and ghosts so thoroughly that its lines have become clichés ("Double, double, toil and...").

Overlooking a couple of obvious ploys that feel a bit clunky, this courageous experimentation by the STC's Residents and director Sam Haren is a striking success. Had this production been surtitled and performed in an Eastern European language, arts festivals around the country would be booking it faster than Macduff could shout "Fuck!" in a bungled fight scene.

The Scottish play has attracted more revivals, adaptations and reworkings than perhaps any in the canon, and the fact that so many of them have been spectacular box-office failures established early in the 18th century an ambivalence about it among theatre people. Accidents do happen on stage, even in our tyrannical era of OH&S, but carpentry falling on the head of a king-killer is always more likely to be reported and remembered than on a bit player in a comedy. Here Vs Macbeth, while preserving most of the original text, interpolates reenactments of certain low points of original play's stage history, captioning them with date and place on TV monitors. But even the actors' simple unadorned slips make our breath shorter: although we expect stage accidents, we can't be sure they are all scripted.

Some of the deliberately added misadventures raise a laugh, such as a sound effect failing and being replaced by the Windows reboot jingle, but many add the ominous feeling of a poltergeist. Is this a stage dagger that Macbeth sees before him, or a real one that might really draw the blood referred to a few lines on? So much of the staging deliberately calls attention to the various contemporary theatrical devices deployed, yet rather than distancing us from the plot's Jacobean cruelty, some of these tricks deliver the horror more forcefully into our gadget-filled heads: the witches use voice modulators, that tool of anonymous evil in a technological age; the "show of Eight Kings" called for when Macbeth consults the witches is simplified to an arresting night-vision video of his face by Richard Back; and most horrific, the slaying of Macduff's young son is depicted by firing several pastel-pink paintballs pointblank into a doll. These hatless and broomless witches, gleefully led by the bearded Alirio Zavarce sporting a handbag, disappear like illusionists ("Whither are they vanish'd?") during the outbreak of a small fire on stage: was it an accident, or a trick against Macbeth, or the actor playing him? Cameron Goodall looks genuinely spooked. This Macbeth is burdened not only by guilt, but also by bad luck on stage and 300 years of opprobrium.

After murdering his way to the throne, Macbeth craves his safety most ("To be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus"), and the set design by Haren and Matthew Keale is rich in the monochromatic livery of contemporary security mechanisms: orange safety vests, black visors, yellow hazard tape, B&W surveillance cameras and a green battery-powered EXIT sign memorably clutched by the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. She is played with agility and clarity by Amber McMahon; indeed each of the Residents assigned a major part discharges it well without upsetting the ensemble: Brett Stiller delivers a magisterial Banquo, and Tahki Saul convincingly spans characters from a fuddy-duddy wheelchair-bound Duncan to the gladiatorial Macduff.

Surprisingly, although adding jokes (even an awful pun between Banquo and banquet) doesn't seem to mar the tragedy's progression, the Porter's scene – the only levity Shakespeare allowed himself in this blackest of his plays – lacked its legendary effect here; perhaps because the business walking under ladders shifted the tone towards Three Stooges slapstick. But the other keynotes of the plot rang out soundly.

Following many (presumably faked) injuries Goodall calls out the inevitable question: "Is there a doctor in the house?"
Lady Macbeth's physician arrives on cue with his diagnosis of the central problem: "Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles." (Even for those merely acting them on stage, it seems.) In the final scene Macduff, benefiting from the prophetic loophole of his Cesarean delivery, slays the allegedly usurping Macbeth and restores the crown to Malcolm. The witches make an unscripted appearance to gloat at the close, thumbs up, as if delighted with the direction in which they have steered the monarchy. If only James were here. Jason Catlett

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Preview:

Adelaide theatremakers the Border Project have joined forces with Sydney Theatre Company's Residents to present a show that tackles the legacy of superstition surrounding Shakespeare's Macbeth. Director Sam Haren explains the concept.

What is Vs Macbeth about?
I guess the show is exploring a fascination that we as an audience can have in seeing things go wrong. We're both telling the story of Macbeth and also interrogating the superstition attached to the play as a play where things go wrong.

It's considered a cursed play isn't it?
There's a real superstition attached to Macbeth. It's viewed as incredibly bad luck to say the word ‘Macbeth' in a theatre unless you're rehearsing or performing the play. There's a whole litany of accidents and mishaps that are connected to the history of the play - some of them are historical fact and others are almost like a folklore or mythology. So we're trying to both do the play and explore this history that's attached to it.

How do you go about that?
From the get-go in the project we wanted to integrate accidents and things that went wrong, both in our own process and within the history of the play. In rehearsal, say, if someone has slipped over at a particular point, we analyse that. It may have happened at a really interesting point in the story. When an accident occurs that has a kind of interest we take it and reposition it.

What kind of bad things have happened, historically?
Theatres have burnt down. People have nearly been killed by sandbags falling from the ceiling. People have been accidentally stabbed and killed - a prop dagger was replaced by a real dagger in a story that's from the 1600s in Amsterdam. There's pretty incredible stories of riots that have occurred inside the theatre. Charlton Heston was wearing these tights that were soaked in kerosene, and he suffered burns and injuries from that. Laurence Olivier was nearly killed by this stage weight.

Why incorporate such misfortunes into the actual play?
I think there is a real connection between the accidents and the play itself. The play is a tragedy, it's about things going wrong for the characters. Also, one of the central interests in the play is this idea that there's a kind of confusion in what we perceive. The witches use the phrase "fair is foul and foul is fair." With the accidents, we're kind of playing around with ‘did that actually go wrong, or is it intended?'

Does the theme play out in the show's design?
Yeah. The design references car-crash testing and crash test dummies. There's a sense that the stage is this big line with hazard tape that separates the audience from the stage space and there are surveillance cameras constantly monitoring everything that happens. Another thing we're using is paintball as a way of staging all of the violence. It's something that's quite volatile and hazardous to have in the space.

Is Shakespeare's script intact?
The adaptation we have of the text is pretty faithful to the overall Shakespeare story. Just like any adaptation, we've probably cut near to a fifth of the material. Nick Dent