'Macbeth' Intrigues the Eye, Assaults the Ear

STRATFORD, Conn.--Let me confess at once that, of all plays in world literature, Macbeth is the one that enthralls me most. I do not claim it is the greatest play--or even Shakespeare's greatest play. After all, the only source is the posthumous First Folio edition, which presents difficult textual problems and is several stages removed from the dramatist's original script. On the one hand, it certainly contains some passages that were foreign interpolations; on the other, it possibly lacks one or two scenes that the Bard originally included. As it stands, it is only about half the length of Hamlet; and The Comedy of Errors is the only shorter work in the canon.

Despite the imperfect state in which the play has come to us, Macbeth surmounts all obstacles and has the power to grip you like no other. I don't mean just its ability to engage the mind; the play has an almost corporeal existence, and can seize you by the throat and wring you out.

One example of the work's appeal came in May of 1849, when on the same evening in New York City there were three simultaneous productions, starring three eminent Macbeths of the time--William Charles Macready, Thomas Hamblin, and Edwin Forrest. These performances led to what has become known as the Astor Place Riot--the worst fracas in theatrical history, besides which even the celebrated free-for-all in Paris at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring seems pale. At the final tally in New York, 31 persons were killed and more than 150 injured. Such is the incredible power of Macbeth. Even in an age with less belief in witches than obtained in the Jacobean era, perhaps we must ascribe some of the work's power to the very supernatural that this play invokes to a larger extent than does any other in Shakespeare's output.

And now for the third time the American Shakespeare Theatre has essayed this masterwork. In 1961 Pat Hingle was woefully miscast in the title role. Six years ago John Colicos was an impressive Macbeth, but poorly supported. For me the current go-around, staged by the AST's artistic director, Michael Kahn, proved frustrating.

THE NEW production is fascinating in concept. It is engrossing to look at, both in its shifting settings and in much of its bits of business. But while it intrigues the eye, it assaults the ear. What a shame that all the effort that went into the technical aspects is so severely scotched by the vocal ineptness of its main players!

For a drama so intentionally full of ambiguities, unusual latitude is afforded a director. Although the historical events on which the work is based lay in the 11th century, Kahn has quite legitimately placed his characters in the time of James I. In choosing a tale from Scottish history, Shakespeare was paying tribute to King James, himself a Scotsman; and in giving such a major role to the supernatural, he was honoring not only a king deeply interested in witch-craft but one who had himself recently written a treatise entitled Daemonologie.

Kahn has further conceived the three witches--or "weird sisters," as they are repeatedly called--as not only having their own spooky lairs, but also as permeating regular society. Thus they are garbed as wives of members of the court, and are listed as Lady Angus, Lady Caithness, and an unspecified dowager. They often hover on the sidelines, and even take over the small role assigned to Lady Macbeth's servant. It is only in their incantatory privacy that they become obviously witchlike by donning half-masks. (Kahn of course omits the spurious interpolations involving Hecate, the patroness of witches; less commendably, he had done a little further cutting, though the production has a running-time of only two and a third hours.)

But if Kahn emphasizes the ubiquity of the clairvoyant witches, he has also underlined the Christian milieu in which his characters live. In fact he had framed his production with a mimed prologue and epilogue, both laid in church. Accompanied by the ringing of bells and the chanting of plainsong, the show opens with King Duncan receiving communion and ends with his son Malcolm being crowned. The officiating priest, crosier in hand, also functions as the Old Man who talks with Ross, and later as the Messenger who urges Lady Macduff to flee with her children.

Furthermore, the characters frequently cross themselves. And much is made of a crucifix from time to time; even one of the witches wears a pectoral cross. When Macbeth sits on his ill-gained throne and exclaims, "To be thus is nothing," he rips the cross from his chest and throws it to the floor, whence, in a neatly ironic touch, it is shortly picked up and handed back to him by the First Murderer.

THE costumes, by Jane Green-wood, are prevailingly black, with white or gray trimming. The exceptions are good King Duncan, who wears the white of purity, and, similarly, Malcolm at his eventual coronation. After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth and his wife, in their hypocritically assumed purity, are the next appearance of white, to be followed by their blood-red robes in the daytime.

The raked stage is dominated by a pair of 20-foot-high steel panels, each with a portal that can be open or shut. The insides of the panels are serrated, so they can close together as tightly as the vise of Destiny grips its victims. Sets of steel stairs roll in and out. When the panels are separated, we see in back a drop with a huge translucent circular screen, on which mobile projections are thrown from the rear.

The settings, fashioned by Douglas Schmidt, and skilfully lit by Marc Weiss, are decidedly modern or futuristic. And electronic incidental music and odd sound effects have been devised by Pril Smiley. One might surmise that the result would be a mishmash. But the idea of putting 11th-century people dressed in 17th-century garb in 20th-century environments is perfectly viable. One of the play's major themes is the wrenching of things out of their accustomed habitats, the appearance of people in "borrowed robes," the distortion of time. And the text is full of references to strange sounds ("every noise appals," Macbeth complains).

There is a fusing of the steel of modern architecture with the armor of medieval soldiers. Even the terrible knocking at the gate is not the usual pounding on wood but instead a clanking on metal. This is a cool, gray world. The huge portraits of Duncan and later of Macbeth and his wife, which are dropped down from the grid, are not colored oils; they are stark black-and-white photographs. Touches of color in this production are rare, and thus all the more striking.

When the witches await Macbeth's first visit, the circular screen shows a sort of magnified and pulsating green organism. At "A drum! A drum! Macbeth doth come," we hear--indeed we feel--the pounding of heartbeats; but the heart, significantly, is afflicted with arrhythmia. In the scene where Ross calls attention to the solar eclipse, the circle becomes a view of the period of totality with its brightly flaming corona. When Banquo is murdered and Fleance escapes, the circle becomes a blood-red target with a bull's-eye of blue, the color of heavenly innocence.

Especially effective is Macbeth's last encounter with the witches. A green-lit trap in the stage is the cauldron in which they make their unholy brew. Simultaneously the vertical circle functions as a top view of the cauldron, changing colors constantly like a kaleidoscope. When "a baboon's blood" is added and Macbeth drinks of the brew--a fine idea--the circle turns red. Then superimposed come the three apparitions, followed by the series of eight kings as a pinwheel. It's a show of virtuosity, but it works.

ALAS, when we come to the two main players, there isn't a hint of virtuosity. If the AST wanted to import someone to play just the single role of Macbeth this summer, why pick Fritz Weaver? Fifteen years ago Weaver attempted Hamlet here, without much success. He hasn't improved in the interim.

Macbeth happens to be a great military general who speaks consistently the greatest poetry of any character in the canon. In real life we don't often find military, compositional and oratorical genius combined in one man--though we had a recent example, starting with the same three letters, in Douglas MacArthur (the comparison shouldn't be pushed any further, needless to say). Macbeth must start off as an admirable person, sink into murder after murder, and bounce back somewhat at the end, winning our pity as a tragic hero despite his crimes. Not easy, but it can be done.

Weaver gives us a Macbeth that fails to engage interest; we just don't care a rap about the guy. Weaver has a rather unattractive voice, and doesn't use well what he has. He fails to penetrate the sense or the rhythm of his lines. And he has never learned how to breathe properly; so we are subjected constantly to his whiffling, snuffling, and gasping. Here he falls into empty ranting, there he delivers a serious line so that it elicits a laugh. One wishes too that he didn't address his servant twice as "patch," when Shakespeare wrote "whey-face" the second time. Wonderful word, "whey-face."

Weaver's final duel with Macduff is much too tame, particularly for those who saw Christopher Plummer's breathtaking swordplay in Cyrano recently. At the end, he pulls out a dagger and seems about to commit suicide when he falls off a parapet; suicide is something no real Macbeth would entertain.

A tiny bouquet, however, for one line-reading. When Macbeth starts up the stairs to kill the king, and a bell rings, almost all editions have him say, "Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/That summons thee to heaven, or to hell." Weaver says, "me to hell." This is an emendation I have always found rather appealing. Aside from the internal rhyme of the contrasting pronouns, it implies that the saintly king will surely achieve salvation and that Macbeth fully realizes the enormity of what he is about to do. It was a pleasure to hear this reading used on stage for a change.

Rosemary Murphy, also brought in for only one role, emphasizes the sensual side of Lady Macbeth. She enjoys wearing a revealing gown with an open V down to the navel. She likes physical touching: the feel of her own or Macbeth's hands running down her skin, the tousling of Macbeth's hair with her affectionate fingers.

Vocally, however, she is not strong enough--the same fault she showed here a decade ago when trying the not unsimilar part of Goneril in King Lear. In talking of the murder plot, when Macbeth asks, "If we should fail?," her reply--"We fail?"--lacks the foreceful scorn, the reassuring incredulity needed to prop his weakening resolve. A sensual Lady Macbeth is perfectly valid, but the role requires a decided steak of masculinity, such as captured so imposingly in the portrayals of Dame Judith Anderson, Mrs. Tore Segelcke, and Siobhan McKenna.

When she comes from her bedchamber, goes through her sleep-walking scene and returns to bed, it is not clear why Miss Murphy enters from the right and exits to the left. Her performance will probably improve as the weeks pass, for at the critics' opening she was not yet even secure in her lines.

Miss Murphy does have one marvelous piece of business in her "unsex me here" soliloquy. When she summons "thick night" and the "smoke of hell," she grabs the pointed crucifix hanging around her neck and spits on it. At the words "my keen knife" she inverts the cross, turning it into a lethal dagger. This is an electrifying moment, altogether fitting for a play in which "fair is foul" and everything is topsy-turvy.

JACK Gwillim is a kindly, virtuous King Duncan; and it is a felicitous touch to have him embrace Macbeth before retiring to his final sleep. Kurt Garfield's bleeding Captain sounds more Jewish than Scottish, Theodore Sorel's Angus is poorly spoken too, and Richard Backus' Donalbain is weak. Jeanne Bartlett is adequate as the ill-fated Lady Macduff, and William Larsen's old Siward is a decided asset. Macduff's son (Glenn Zachar) is far too old; so is Fleance (Keith McDermott), who seems to be assisted in his escape by the mysterious Third Murderer engaged to kill him (is a double agent at work here?).

Even Lee Richardson, who was so fine a Ross years ago in a Boston production and who has played the title role at Yale (would he were doing it here!), strikes one as curiously uninvolved. His appearances at the banquet as a ghost, however, are cleverly managed.

Rex Everhart is splendid in his one comic cameo as the drunken Porter. Coleridge thought this scene spurious, but it is genuine Shakespeare and inspired dramaturgy. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth hears the chilling pounding at the gate and has second thoughts: "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!" How follow such a climactic moment? Shakespeare's solution was perfect. The only comparable spot I can think of occurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, when the full chorus climaxes thrillingly with words about "standing before God," and is followed by the ludicrously syncopated sounds of a distant street-march.

It is what Bernard Shaw called Shakespeare's "word music" that is so lacking generally in this Macbeth, though it is there in unsurpassed abundance in the text. The only scene placed in England, which comes well towards the end, is the single instance where its three main participants show a full feeling for the melody and rhythm of their lines as well as the sense. Praise, then, for Michael Levin's Macduff, Alvah Stanley's Ross, and, above all, Philip Kerr's Malcolm. In this colloquy these three men talk to each other, listen to each other, and demonstrate their musicality. But it is a long, long time before we get to this beautifully spoken scene.

In an attempt to put the disappointing performances of the two principals out of my mind as I drove home, I tried to think of players whose work I had seen but whose performances as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth I most regretted missing. I extrapolated that I would have most admired the Macbeths of Laurence Olivier and Ian Keith, and the Lady Macbeths of Florence Reed and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Well, there will be more productions of Macbeth; and, unlike Macduff in the just-cited scene, I have not lost my hopes.

(Ed. Note--The drive to the picturesque American Shakespeare Theatre's grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air-conditioned Theatre traditionally tend to begin promptly at either 2 p.m. or 8:30 p.m. There are free facilities for picnickers on the premises.)