Macbeth (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 148

Beschreibung

The spellbinding story of love and murder, power and paranoia, and the internal struggles of a married couple as they try to control their destiny, and one another… This official tie-in edition to the Donmar Warehouse's hotly anticipated 2023 revival of Shakespeare's extraordinary psychological drama features rich and revealing behind-the-scenes material exploring how the production was conceived and developed. Starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, and directed by Donmar Associate Director Max Webster, this bracingly fresh version used binaural sound technology to place the audience inside the minds of the Macbeths, asking us: are we are ever really responsible for our actions? In addition to the version of Shakespeare's text performed, this volume also includes a fascinating rehearsal diary, colour photos, and interviews with its leading cast and creative team: Tennant, Jumbo and Webster, plus designer Rosanna Vize, sound designer Gareth Fry and composer and musical director Alasdair Macrae.

Leseprobe

William Shakespeare

MACBETH

Edited by Max Webster

With additional material compiled by Alessandra Davison

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Interview with Max Webster (director)

Interview with Rosanna Vize (designer)

Interview with Gareth Fry (sound designer) and Alasdair Macrae (composer and musical director)

Interview with David Tennant (Macbeth) and Cush Jumbo (Lady Macbeth)

Week One Rehearsal Diary by Alessandra Davison

Production History

Rehearsal Photographs

MACBETH

A Note on the Text

About the Authors

Copyright Information

Interview with Max Webster (director)Speaking to Alessandra Davison

What particularly draws you to Macbeth as a play?

I was reading about a psychologist called James Hillman, who was head of the Jung Institute in Zurich, and he was talking about the relationship between what culture can do and the extreme situation in which we find ourselves in the world right now. He wrote:

‘Suppose we entertain the idea that the world is in extremis, suffering an acute, and perhaps fatal, disorder at the edge of extinction. Then I would claim that what the world needs right now is radical and original extremes of feeling and thinking in order for its crisis to be met with equal intensity.’

I think Macbeth is one of the most radical and original extremes of thinking and feeling in the English language. As so, as we try to understand the extremity of the world right now, the origin of the violence and suffering, and the link between the personal and political, Macbeth seemed like it might be able to speak to our present moment.

How did the idea evolve to stage Macbeth using binaural sound?

When you say you’re going to direct Macbeth, everyone asks how are you going to do the witches? It struck me early on that the witches might be a way of thinking about what we now call ‘mental health’. In the past, forces outside our control, things that make us hallucinate, or do things against our will, were once described as magic or supernatural – but nowadays we describe these same phenomena psychologically. Macbeth is a soldier returning from a bloody war when he meets three supernatural creatures. Many soldiers returning from war today experience what is now called PTSD, which can often include aural and visual hallucinations.

I was also struck by the fact that the Macbeths have lost a child, and if we think about post-partum mental health, especially when child death is involved, that can also lead to huge mental health challenges, including psychosis.

Which is a long way of saying I wanted to try and suggest that the witches could be voices in the Macbeths’ heads, rather than the now clichéd images of three hags skipping round a cauldron. Could the devilish witches actually be inner demons?

So how do you do voices in the head? Well, you could just put it through a speaker, or you could have the whole company doing the voices or something. But I wondered if you could push that idea one step further and actually get the voices coming into the audience’s head as though they were in the position of the Macbeths. Binaural technology allows you to not just hear a voice very closely and intimately, but to 3D-image-locate that voice, so it actually sounds like it’s whispering in your head, putting the audience into the same position as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The headphones become not just an exciting piece of technology and not just a way of hearing the language and characters up close, but also a way of putting the audience inside the heads of the central characters.

How is incorporating this element of the production working in the rehearsal room?

It’s going well. There’s a lot of tech, so at the moment we’re still setting up various microphones and there are lots of cables and wires, loop pedals and faders. This keeps pushing us to stage the play in new and innovative ways. We are constantly asking what this scene looks like from the perspective of the Macbeths, inside their heads, rather than what objective reality would be like. That’s really helpful because it’s a text that’s done so often, we think we know it and think we know what it’s about. But, actually, if you really dig into it, it’s a whole lot weirder than we usually think. Having this intervention helps us to see that weirdness afresh.

How did you go about gathering your creative team and forming collaborations?

It’s normally very specific for each job. I think about which artists I’m inspired by and want to make work with. And then, depending on what we’re making, what the specific things are that the artist needs to contribute to the production. For example, our composer Alasdair Macrae is a Scottish folk musician because it felt to me that the musical world of the play should be rooted in ancient Gaelic songs. The sound designer is Gareth Fry because he is a wizard with binaural technology and how that can be used to tell stories. I thought that we needed a choreographer and movement director who both thinks in terms of using actors’ bodies to tell stories, but also has an interest in traditional dances, which is why I asked Shelley Maxwell. It’s person by person, and the specific skills that they bring to create a team.

You’ve gone to great lengths to cast (except for Lady Macbeth) an all-Scottish cast. Why was this important to you?

Well, it’s called ‘the Scottish play’! And it was written because for the first time in the history of what we now call the United Kingdom, there was a Scottish king upon the throne of the joint England and Scotland. The play also makes more sense in a Scottish context: if you go to the Hebrides and look out over the wild expanse of heather and open sky, you can really imagine the witches, the clans, the love and the violence.

We’re thinking a lot at the moment in British theatre about what authentic representation is and what that means, and I think we should be applying that kind of rigour and respect to all the different cultures that historically make up the British Isles.

I’d also add that I think Shakespeare has been claimed by a very particular demographic in England. It’s often now associated with English RP accents and a certain class structure, that wasn’t at all how it was originally. The Globe was a rough-and-tumble experience for people, much more like bear-baiting, than some elite and snooty experience. So in a way, having an almost entirely Scottish company is a way of slightly pushing back against that unhelpful tradition and reclaiming Shakespeare as a popular dramatist.

Has it been interesting, creatively, having Lady Macbeth as the only non-Scottish cast member, and has that been incorporated in the production in any way?

It was very much part of our thinking. One of the play’s big questions is: ‘Why did the Macbeths kill the king?’ If you’re brought up in a particular social structure, you might take that structure as given. At the beginning of the play, although Macbeth is ambitious, he thinks of the king as a holy figure and not someone he can really imagine killing. Lady Macbeth coming from outside of that culture might mean she’s less in awe of that social structure, less impressed by that tradition and not as interested in preserving it. It could mean that she gives Macbeth the burst of energy needed to think about things in a different way. The societal structure might look more changeable, and within that change is the possibility that he could become king.

What else did you focus on during the casting process?

I’m always interested in actors that bring a lot of character and personality to the roles, so we’ve got a group of very unique individuals, who all feel really different, and that’s been helpful when trying to create a cross section of a society. Scotland – like England – has never been monocultural, and it felt important to reflect that too. I was also on the lookout for actors who would be up for experimenting and trying to find a new way of staging this play – as well as people who have a facility for speaking Shakespeare in a way that is comprehensible and modern. So lots of considerations really! But I’m really excited to be working with this company – they surprise and move me every day.

You haven’t been restricted by matching gender roles in casting either. How did that come about?

For me, it’s always a consideration. If you look at the Complete Works of Shakespeare, women say about twenty per cent of the text and men eighty per cent. Which means if you want to achieve gender parity, in terms of who says what in Shakespeare, you need to change the gender of about a third of the characters. And that’s what I’ve tried to do for the last ten years when directing Shakespeare. If we really want to claim that these plays can speak to now, I think it’s important we look honestly at what gender is doing in these texts and think about what we need to do to address that. Changing the gender of a few characters is just a starting point.

We’ve spoken a lot about sound, but how important is music in this production?

In some ways the witches are part of a folk tradition – they know the kinds of spells and enchantments that were swept away by modern science. So I wanted the music to speak of that wild pagan tradition. And for me, that is the sound of Scottish folk music. There’s also something about this ancient music that gives me chills. It goes to the core of your emotion in a way that is wild and free and liberated. It links back to thinking about the play as an exploration of extremes; what it is to be an extremity, both as an individual and society.

What preparation was most useful for you prior to entering the rehearsal room?

Creating an edition of the text was a great way to get to know it really well, and ensure I understood every word. I read some of the criticism on the play and watched a few other versions of Macbeth on film to try to see what I felt works – and what didn’t. I also spent a lot of time with the creative team, as well as Cush [Jumbo] and David [Tennant], in different combinations, talking through each scene, and starting to work out some staging ideas. We also had a couple of short workshops to try out some of the scenes, which was an essential part of testing our theatrical language.

Last year you directed Henry V for the Donmar. What’s it like returning with another Shakespeare and how have you found the process to differ?

I’m always really happy to be directing Shakespeare. My approach to Henry V was to try to stage a real cross section of Britain, through the prism of the British Army. We worked with a military consultant and tried to accurately present soldiers, looking at how you handle a gun, how you pack a backpack, how you cook food on a little stove. We tried to follow protocol, illustrate structure and chains of command.

Macbeth, although it is also about war, seems to be much less interested in the nitty-gritty of battle. It’s not interested in the logistics of siege or how a bridge is captured. In Macbeth, they’re marching carrying huge branches of Birnam Wood, an image more symbolic than logistical. Henry V felt more like you were watching it from the outside and seeing a portrait of the society; with Macbeth we’re trying to put the audience inside the head space of that central couple and ask what it’s like to have a particular psychological experience. If Henry V was more documentary, Macbeth is more phantasmagoria or nightmare.

If Shakespeare was alive today, what’s the most burning question you’d have for him about the play?

Is this the play that you actually wrote or is this some mangled version remembered by actors, six months later, in a pub?

Interview with Rosanna Vize (designer)Speaking to Alessandra Davison

Can you talk about your general design process when working on a theatre show?

I think my process is very influenced by the people I’m working with. As an artist or designer, I like collaborating and interacting with different artists, so conversation is a huge part of my process. I generally just try to spend a lot of unpressured time with a director. Not that it’s always possible; different shows have different time constraints on them, and different directors have different working patterns. But I suppose my ideal process is one where I might meet up with the director I’m working with at least twice a week, up until the concept meeting. We might go and see work together and, actually, spend quite a lot of time talking about everything apart from how we’re going to make the show. Well, everything about the show apart from how it’s going to look. Because actually that is what influences the images and the visual world. What I design tends to be more about the feeling of the thing that we’re trying to make, rather than the problem-solving of the thing, if that makes sense?

How early did your conversations around Macbeth start?

I’d say I’ve been talking to Max since May 2023 – so it’s been over six months. This is the first time we’ve worked together, so there was a process of getting to know each other’s rhythms and how we make work.

With this, which is slightly unusual for me but also quite exciting, Max came to me saying, ‘I want you to design this. Here’s an idea floating around in my head.’ This was about it being a psychological experience, really focusing on the Macbeths’ shared trauma. To me this felt really potent. I think there is a huge challenge to designing a big Shakespeare in a small venue. Although the Donmar has enormous resources, physically it is very small. When Max talked to me about really focusing in on this central idea of what unfolds in Macbeth being a trauma response, I could see what that might look like. The second time I met him is when he came out with: ‘I think the way to do that is binaural sound.’ This was very much something that Max had been thinking about for a while. I think the way he works is by slowly introducing ideas to his fellow creatives, so it doesn’t feel like he’s forcing it on us. He tests the water bit by bit. I was excited by using binaural sound to really interrogate a brain and the way that it responds to trauma, and then exploring how you allow an audience into that. I felt like this was a very clear, conceptually robust way of doing Macbeth. For me it then became about translating that into 3D.

How did your ideas and design concept for this specific production evolve and change?

I think what’s interesting is, although there’s been lots of very small adaptations along the way, if I look back at the earliest render or sketch that I did, it’s pretty close to where we are now. Not every process works this way, but it does feel like our first instinct was very close to what we settled on. That’s also because Max came to me with something very strong and we found a way to make that work. One thing I would say is that I never really look back on a design process and see twelve different designs, because I like to work quite slowly with directors and quite closely. It does tend to be that we step towards what the design ends up being together, rather than me presenting multiple options and us then choosing one.

What sort of visual references did you use for this production?