Macbeth in the Twentieth Century
This performance of Radio Macbeth continues in the genealogy of notable Macbeth productions. David Bevington, renowned Shakespeare scholar and Chair of the University of Chicago Theater and Performance Studies Department, examines several remarkable twentieth-century productions of Macbeth.
The twentieth century has been a time of experimentation in nonrepresentational staging and of candid exploration of evil in the context of modern experience with war and terror. Orson Welles directed a Macbeth with an all black cast at New York’s Lafayette Theater in 1936, with the witches replaced by voodoo practitioners.
Peter Hall’s 1967 production at Stratford-upon-Avon consciously explored what Hall termed “the metaphysics of evil,” opening with a large white sheet that fluttered away at the approach of the witches to reveal a blood red carpet…[In 1975], at Stratford-upon-Avon, Trevor Nunn produced a dark, brooding version of the play, with Nicol Williamson playing Macbeth, in the words of drama critic Irving Wardle, as “a secretive man who becomes more and more unreachable until by the end events are happening only in his head.” Two years later, at The Other Place in Stratford, Nunn brilliantly directed Ian McKellen and Judi Dench on a small, bare stage with a few crates as props, emphasizing the claustrophobic world created by Macbeth’s manic evil.
Adrian Noble’s Macbeth, starring Jonathan Pryce, at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1986, was domestic and introverted – and all the more terrifying for being so, finding the tragedy in Macbeth’s inability to live with the consequences of his actions and their ramifications.
Macbeth has also attracted the attention of gifted filmmakers…Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) revels in the kind of graphic and sensational violence that film can exploit, establishing the deep pessimism of Polanski’s vision. Macbeth’s defeat does not signal a renewed order: Macduff’s victory is achieved with a random blow, and the play ends with Donalbain now in search of the witches and his own crown. Beyond doubt the greatest film version of Macbeth is Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), in which the story of Macbeth is retold in terms of Japanese warlord history, with arresting images of mist-shrouded forests and mysteriously disappearing witches, and spare oriental interiors that intensify the loneliness of the murdering protagonists.
Whenever it is performed, Macbeth‘s desolating story of crime and tragic failure remains essentially timeless, even while it enables the performers to gather around them the particular forms of human gesture and experience through which succeeding generations of actors and playgoers have striven to understand Shakespeare’s masterful play.
–Excerpted from Macbeth in Performance, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Bantam Books, ed. David Bevington
