The essence of Macbeth
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Transcript
- Michael
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My thing about Macbeth is that I’ve seen a lot of productions of Macbeth. I’ve also played it before and directed it before, and the thing that I most find disappointing generally in Macbeth productions is that they turn into a kind of a boys’ own adventure, or an ooky spooky story with witches. To me that’s just too much tip of the iceberg, it’s a far deeper more frightening play than that, and yes, there is a big fight at the end, and yes there is blood, but it really isn’t about that.
As I said in my programme notes, it’s about a man who knowingly wages mortal war on his own soul. Knows from the beginning that he is going to be damned, goes there anyway and then gets killed. It’s a very….in a way it’s a very thankless role, because you play somebody that people grow not to like and then you die. So it’s very important to me that more happens than just the witches or the violence.
The play is not called ‘The Witches’, it’s called ‘Macbeth’, so it’s not about the witches at all, and a lot of productions tend to over dramatise the witches in my opinion, and make them into something just way too present. Not so much present as not frightening. Now in Shakespeare’s day they would have been scary, so how do you do that in a modern context? What makes a scary witch?