Macbeth’s self awareness

Again, when you are performing on stage, especially with Shakespeare, it’s never the same any night. The audience is an absolutely vital component, and it changes and grows. I wanted to stick with the self-knowledge, I wanted Macbeth to know from the beginning that if he did this he would go to hell basically in a hand basket. He would be damned. He would become a monster, and unfeeling, unable to feel anything, to believe anything except that life is nothing. I want him to be aware of that from the beginning, so that when he got there, there was this awful self awareness, and that was really what I tried to do most.

Now in terms of whether he was a nice man at the beginning or whether he was a brave warrior, or you know whatever, those things came after that initial central thing that I was trying to get. And yeah, I guess….and also I am very clear about Macbeth, before he even walks onto the stage, he has already thought about this, he has already thought about killing the king, it’s really important that. He has identified with evil by his first line, “Foul and fairer day I have not seen”. And the witches say, “Fair is foul and foul is fair”, and Banquo says “Why do you start and seem to fear things that you sound so fair”.

And so he even also is involved in that world, except that he has a different word, he has fear, and the thing about that, is that Banquo does fear what might happen to him, and so he is placed in sort of a, if you like a Christian ethos of goodness, and Macbeth is placed in a Christian ethos of badness, and right from the beginning that is exactly how it is. And it’s just that Macbeth gets there first. I think Banquo would have gone there, it just takes longer. And he doesn’t have time in the end he gets killed, so yeah that was my main thing.