The symbolism of the bath in Michael’s production of Macbeth

It’s quite an interesting question that actually opens under the question of the bath. Okay any vessel in literature is a female symbol pretty much, a womb symbol, pitchers full of water, you look at it, art history, the lot, vessels tend to represent the womb.

I put Lady Macbeth in a bath….I’ll get to your child thing, because I wanted her to be at her most sensual, protected, warm, soft, you know naked woman in a bath. It’s a lovely image. It’s a beautiful image, and yet at that very moment, she says “Unsex me here”. So at that moment she is most womanly, she is asking to have all that womanliness taken out of her. Do you get it?

So there she is in this womb symbol, and she has got a womb of course, she gets out, she says “Unsex me here”, she says some extraordinary things in that speech. I don’t know if you realise how amazing that speech is. She says, “Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunction visitings of nature shake my foul purpose”.

If that’s not asking for no more periods, I don’t know what is. She is really asking for the centre of her womanliness to be taken. And as soon as she has asked for that, the very next thing that happens, Macbeth walks in and he has been at war.

He hasn’t seen her for weeks, what does he want? He wants her to be a woman, and so she is a woman to him, but she is pretending because she is not a woman any more, is she? So it’s a hideous moment, it’s an extraordinary moment.

Now the bath becomes a symbol of womb, and therefore when the child is in the bath and is murdered eventually in the bath, it’s like killing a child in the womb to me. It works on that level, on the symbolic level. And the witches say early on, “I will drain him dry as hay”.

I think….I know the witches in my production, they kill Macbeth in his seed, in his very seed, they drain, it, they kill him so he will not have children. They kill her in her seed if you like, in her fruition, in her fecundity. They kill and eradicate every sense of the Macbeths. It’s not just a matter of murdering them, they take everything away, there is no offspring, nothing, it’s stamped out.

So when Macbeth goes to see the witches and the cauldron which I turn into a bath, a cauldron is a female symbol as well. You can’t go into double double, toil and trouble, that’s just stupid. I mean it’s lovely poetry, but it’s silly, who’s going to really get scared by that? Let’s put in some frogs and stuff. It doesn’t work to me in the modern sense.

So I thought okay, well there it is and he can be in the bath, and of course what happens is that child who becomes the visions. The child is with the witches in my production at the beginning. The child is placed there. They know what they are going to do with the child. They are going to make the child prophecy to Macbeth, the child becomes all the visions of children rising out of the cauldron, and plus the child when it starts splashing Macbeth, he is now starting to see all of the descendants of Banquo and in fact Banquo himself.

I didn’t have a Banquo’s ghost. I didn’t have Banquo hanging around. I just thought that the splashing would turn into the device that makes Macbeth see these visions, and that’s why we have the splashing of the water, so that it was as if the child….was….everytime the splashing hit Macbeth, he saw another child and another child, and another descendent of Banquo until he could no longer stand it, and that was the idea.