HERE’S the challenge in staging a new National Theatre production of Macbeth; how do you straddle three time frames and produce a play that’s still exciting and relevant?
Macbeth told a story of 11th century life, but it was written around 1600 - and it has to connect with a modern-day audience.
What of the idea of witchcraft? We tend not to see it featured in the news too often. And what about the representation of women, given the powerful feminist agenda which now informs British theatre? How mad will Lady M be allowed to be.
National Theatre director Rufus Norris defends the staging of the play. “Shakespeare, in a sense is timeless, but on the other hand it’s been done in every possible way,” he acknowledges. “Yet, there are reasons for doing it. One, people want to come and see it; if it were a bad idea nobody would come.
“But for me, the more compelling argument is that so many young people study it and now they get to see it performed.”
Norris’s Macbeth tries to capture the central themes; chaos, anarchy, desperation and madness in a context of his own creation. He’s set his Scottish play set in a barbaric world afflicted by civil war, but not defined by time or place.
It’s been described by London critics as having a “post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic.” It certainly features desperate people living in desperate times. The Macbeths are broke: they live out of a suitcase in a tiny breezeblock hut. Lady M’s clothes are torn; his armour strapped on with parcel tape.
Norris says this imagery represents the chaotic world 11th century Scotland would have experienced, under attack from Norseman and tribal warfare.
The play has a modern-day resonance he says because the chaos of 11th century Scotland isn’t far away from conflict zones he’s seen such as in the Eastern Europe. “We kept being drawn to the contemporary,” he explains. “We kept thinking what if the internet broke down, the banks didn’t open, the rubbish wasn’t collected, what would happen? Well, perhaps we’d have a scenario that looked like Aleppo. Our world could look like the Balkans.”
He adds; “There is a lot to be aware of in that Macbeth reflects politics in the world today. Look at what’s happening in America, a President who does what he wants. Thought becomes action. The rule of law disappears.”
What of Lady Macbeth? Does she have more or a modern sensibility?
“We haven’t cut a line of Lady Macbeth. There is precious little to begin with. She recognise she exists in a very brutal environment. And Macbeth is a weak king so someone has to do something.
“Lady Macbeth has the balls to do this but we’ve made the context more vulnerable and we try to mime the humanity of her. She has lost at least one of her children, her immortality has gone, her only comfort would be seen to come with power. This helps her sleep in her bed without fear, and have a little bit of a life.”
The director “wanted to turn the volume up on the survival side of it.”
Understandable, or else what you have is a mad woman. But the play, as Norris re-defines it, is about the complex breakdown of a relationship. “Now most us have not decided to commit regicide,” he says, grinning, “but we can understand how we can isolate our partners. That’s the brilliance of Shakespeare; he takes people in extremis, and applies the universal to it.”
The witches are given a new positioning. They represent our need to reach into superstition when times get tough. “In conflict, belief systems come to the fore. Superstition rises up. And look at the recent story whereby the head of the army in Thailand declared recently he was praying to the raindrops to help the boys trapped in the mine. Amazing.”
It’s fair to say critics haven’t taken to the NT’s London run. But Norris is determined to make it work, even though he wasn’t always a lover of Shakespeare . And the director hasn’t worked on a Shakespeare production for 25 years.
“It took me a long time to fall in love with Shakespeare after my school experiences,” he recalls. “Somehow it wasn’t brought to life. I just didn’t get the emotional literacy of the play. Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it. Had I seen a production it may have been different.
“But audience reaction has been incredible. That tells me we’ve doing it right.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here