..., or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bard

For everyone's benefit, from our producer Mia:

"The Emperor's New Clothes"...

...I mean Macbeth, is moving to Broadway. So six weeks worth of Lyceum audiences can congratulate themselves for being so cultured.

For all of Goold's referencing Stalin and horror movies, this was bloodless, lifeless, listless. Unfortunate in a play that is about high passion, a play usually associated with the destructive seductiveness of ambition and power. They had an opportunity for a plausible new take. An older Macbeth, whose ambition could be said to be in a state of constant languish because of: 1) an inability to put himself on the line, politically; 2) a resistance to intellectual strategy - he does better with strategic warfare; 3) provinciality; 4) lack of imagination; 5) childlessness - no heirs to bequeath a kingddom to and he's too old to make babies; 6) he's too old. Then Lady M has reasons: 1) she's bored; 2) many opportunities for greatness, all passed up, and she's not gonna let another one go to waste; 3) something's not adding up: hubby is heralded warrior, great in bed, but flaccid when it comes to self-advancement/self-improvement. OR he's a great warrior, a poor lover, and her saying he is manly in bed is just stroking -- she'll crown whichever of his heads she can; 4) she really cares for him and wants the best for him and she'll get it for him because he can't do it for himself because he's too old; 5) she can't cope with the age thing and she's off her meds.

I do think Stewart was having an off night, but man, this was how I was taught NOT to do Shakespeare. So internal with hyper-articulated, sung speech. Shakespeare's characters are smart, think fast on their feet, and have a facility with language. Even the not so smart ones are at least witty or funny in their slowness. All those elongated syllables made me think they didn't know what to say next. When every single word is special, none of them are. Key words, key words, key words, puh-leeeeze!

I couldn't decipher anything resembling the messy things that make human beings so interesting (especially as rendered so expertly by Shakespeare): conflict (internal and external, but always active), a range of emotion, contradiction, fallibility (moral and physical), to name a few.

Stewart played "I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,/To one of woman born" from the get-go. So nowhere to go. Anyway, he seemed to have just phoned it in.

So, all this rant (believe me, it is but a small percentage of my real rant and I'm not subjecting the rest of the Mackers who didn't see the show to it) because of the upcoming work on MacB@McK. The basement, that elevator, the projections, the scene with the intercom, the train, the torture scene -- all became just so many effects and gimmicks, finally tiresome at best and infuriating at worst, because no compelling, grounded thing held them together. Gordon, it's what I meant when I talked about having a really beautiful, but sturdy container for your ideas. The integrity of that container is key, because until you know what it is, you won't know what to put in it.

Over and out. For now.

Mia


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I'm still not sure how I feel about P-Stew. The main thing was, it was never mine. It was always theirs.

What's most upsetting is that, in ENgland, everyone goes, of even if I didn't love it, we'll have another major production probably next year, or the next. Whereas here there's always the drive to make things definitive. That's deadly. I don't want our Macbeth to be definitive. I want it to be specific. I want simultaneously for ours to stick with you, but always allow for room for any and other Macbeth ever you may ever see.

The actors weren't all behind Mr. Goold (the director). They let the air out of a lot of it, starting with Mr. Stewart. I don't know if that's anyone's fault. My theory is, here's my idea, but if it doesn't work for you the actor, let's find something that does. It has to be the actor's, ultimately, or it will never get to the audience.

I don't feel entirely as Mia did, but I'm still working that out. Will get back to y'all.