The tragic flaw of Macbeth

The tragic flaw of Macbeth, classically people would tell you it’s ambition. Of course they will, he says it. “I have no spur to prick the size of my intent, but only vaulting ambition”. She says “What thou was highly that was thou holy was placed false and yet was wrongly win”. Okay so that’s one thing. I think it’s more complex than that, and I think this is the beauty of Shakespeare. This is what you can do. My Macbeth was my age. Lady Macbeth was 20 years younger. Now if you are a man at 48 and you’ve got a 28 year old wife, and ten years ago when you got married, because they would have got married young in those days, you were a good catch. You were likely to be a king, and you could possibly have children. Ten years later no king, no kids. What does that do?

Put that in a modern context, it’s your mid life crisis, it’s a total mid life crisis. And I wanted to do that. He wants to please her, so my Macbeth, yes he was ambitious, but he backs off that, his fatal flaw was that he loved his wife and he wanted to please her completely and utterly. That’s what is the problem, and couldn’t.

So that is how I took it to be, more complexities than just a straight forward thing, and not making her….I know I’m touching on a lot of issues here, but not making her a nagging wife, awful evil nag, that’s this big. She’s not this big. She is this big. They are all like that, Shakespearean tragic heroes, and heroines are enormous, and they are not to be put in little boxes.