Elysium Theatre Company’s are about to perform a new production of Macbeth, which forms part of this summer’s Durham Shakespeare Festival.
Dr Daniel Blank chats with director Jake Murray about how past productions have influenced his new staging, and how contemporary events have given this canonical play a fresh significance.
Macbeth has been popular recently, with high-profile actors like Ruth Negga, Daniel Craig, and Saoirse Ronan taking on leading roles in the past few years. What led you to stage this play now?
Macbeth is a play I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I have always been drawn to plays which operate from a deep humanity but confront some of the darkest issues of human existence. By facing that darkness and finding the ruined humanity within it we stand a chance of understanding it, ourselves, and, by extension, maybe stop them happening in the world.
Macbeth is a play of extremes, extremes of goodness and evil, of high spirituality and dark malevolence, of intense love and intense hatred, or murderous intent but also great heroism. Most Elysium shows have explored these territories – Jesus Hopped The A Train and The Island were both set in prisons, Playland dealt with the scars of war and the racial oppression of Apartheid, Miss Julie and A Doll’s House took apart male-female relationships and so on – in many ways Macbeth is the ultimate exploration of them all. It’s thrilling, visceral, complex, challenging, and full of startling honesty and truth. Who wouldn’t want to do such a play? And if you only get to do one Shakespeare, why not choose this most dynamic and direct of them all?
Have any of the past productions of Macbeth influenced your own?
The most powerful production of Macbeth I have ever seen was my father’s at the Royal Exchange, which starred David Threlfall and Frances Barber and was set in the dormitory of a Nazi death camp, with inmates staging a production to try and understand and enact the process of darkness that had brought them there.
But, ironically, it’s not stage productions that have influenced me or even films of the play, but films and real life.
Film versions of Shakespeare almost never work because his writing is so verbal, but film is the natural heir of Shakespeare. He was a master at creating the epic sweep that we associate with cinema, of marshalling huge arrays of characters and weaving them into gripping narratives. His storytelling was cinematic, but his brilliance lay in his ability to dig deep into theme and character in a way few films aspire to do.
In terms of real life, the brutal landscape of the play is familiar to us from the wars of carnage of the last 100 years, from World War One and World War Two and the many totalitarian regimes that have blighted our world. It’s no surprise that a play like Macbeth meant so much to people labouring under oppressive regimes. It gave them the means to talk about what was happening to them and find ways to resist more effectively. Shakespeare as an act of defiance if you will. Drawing on both these sources are already a major part of our production.
What aspect of your production are you most excited about? What are you doing differently from other performances of Macbeth that you’ve seen?
Macbeth is a notoriously difficult play to pull off. We’ve all seen terrible productions of it, which is baffling given that on paper it seems like a gift to a director: a thrilling, gripping psychological drama full of action, sensation, violence and the supernatural. I don’t know how we differ from other productions, but I can say that we are going for three key things in our production: a coherent world expressed through an ensemble ethic, a stripped back, austere, direct style of production, and a commitment to the psychological complexity and emotional extremity of the play.
By a coherent world, I mean one that has an internal logic. Something productions often miss is the fact that Shakespeare, who worked with an ensemble, always created worlds on stage, peopled by communities with value systems, hierarchies and networks of relationships that they try to live by. They often get blown apart and plunged into crisis, as they do in King Lear and very much so in Macbeth. If you want to truly unleash the power of a play like Macbeth you have to create that world so you can show what is at stake, what is being destroyed and how it impacts on people. Elysium always works on an ensemble basis and there’s no better way to create that sense of community than working through an ensemble. Although my fellow co-founders Danny Solomon Hannah Ellis-Ryan are at the heart of the show, the whole company is getting full attention and giving their all to make every moment count. Macbeth is a stripped back play, with very brutal, direct language, very little excess baggage and a fast-moving, spare mode of storytelling. Our production will reflect that: very simple lighting and sound, fast, overlapping scene changes, and an emphasis on the actor and their use of their bodies, voices and the texts.
Last of all, we want to confront the complexity, ambiguity and richness of the play’s portrayal of human nature. Shakespeare is not simplistic, he is not reassuring, he will inspire you but he will not flatter you or give you easy answers. Macbeth is made up of scene after explosive scene, where you see the depths and the heights to which human beings are capable of going. Don’t expect to come out feeling you’ve had your pre-conceptions reinforced, rather that you will have been put through a gripping emotional roller coaster of a show which will ask you to love and hate, condemn and sympathise and, we hope, see yourself and all humanity’s beating heart on stage.
What have you discovered about this play during the rehearsal process? Has your vision changed at all, either in the rehearsal room or through conversations with actors and scholars in the run-up to the Durham Shakespeare Festival?
I’ve known the play for about 35 years, but nothing makes you really get to know a play like directing it. You discover so much you go deep down into the language, the action, the psychology of the characters and the network of ideas.
For instance, I had never truly appreciated how powerfully the idea of family and childbirth runs through it. There are powerful resonances between Duncan’s line, Banquo’s line, and Macduff’s line, all in stark contrast to the lack of any line for the Macbeths; we hear of Lady Macbeth’s memory of her father and the devastating detail of her lost child; Macbeth talks of ‘pity, like a new-born babe’ and encounters an apparition that manifests as a bloody child and warns Macbeth to fear no-one of ‘woman born’, perhaps subconsciously echoing his lost child; Macduff’s children are killed, but in turn he is able to kill Macbeth because he was ‘from [his] mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’. The Thanes themselves are all members of an extended family – kinsmen, cousins – and Scotland itself is presented as a kind of family that needs to be protected. Castles, where families shelter or are killed, are important – Glamis, Fife, Dunsinane. What was it about family that caused Shakespeare to create this network of images to thread themselves through the play? Was he trying evoke a society where this primal connection to the body, the earth, survival itself, was more vital than in any other of his plays? Who knows?
The other thing I’ve discovered is just how modern the play is, and how little things have changed. As we rehearsed the death of Lady Macduff and her son, we were struck at how that scene was being played out for real all over the world, in Syria, the Congo and, of course, Ukraine, to name just three such places. The play’s portrayal of the psyche of a murderer and the layers of the mind that help or hinder both Macbeths anticipates Freud and Jung and their identification of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious layers of the mind. Its dramatisation of how one man’s megalomania can express itself in the form of a murderous, totalitarian state, seems to anticipate everyone from Hitler and Stalin to Pol Pot, Bashar al-Assad and, yes, Vladimir Putin. As we rehearsed the scene in which Malcolm plans to retake Scotland, Prighozin led his Wagner Group against Moscow and Putin, like Macbeth, fled to a safe place where he could defend himself if need be. Everything goes in cycles. We don’t learn. A Macbeth will always arise who thinks he will get away with it, and will always fall eventually.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that this play features ‘an entire absence of comedy’, that it is ‘wholly and purely tragic’. Do you agree? Does your production feature only tragedy, or are there moments of levity as well (perhaps in the Porter scene, which Coleridge felt had not been written by Shakespeare himself)?
The great German poet and playwright, Friedrich Schiller, adored Shakespeare, but couldn’t bear the fact that he would bring comic characters on in the midst of tragedy. The Porter was a case in point, but also the Clown who comes on to give Cleopatra the asp that kills her. In fact Shakespeare had a keener awareness of an audience’s needs than Schiller (great playwright though he was), and recognised that humour was an essential part of tragedy, especially gallows humour. Ask any soldier sheltering in a fox hole whether humour is a survival mechanism. Indeed the whole point of theatre is the two masks, one of comedy and one of tragedy. Without bother neither works. So just as Shakespeare’s comedies always skirt tragedy – the crisis between Shylock and Antonio, the extremity to which Malvolio is pushed – so his tragedies always include comedy.
The Porter is brought on at a moment of high tension. Without his appearance the play would be unbearable for the audience. But its the darkest of dark humour: he’s pretending he’s the Porter of Hellgate, and the jokes are about eternal damnation, treachery, drunkenness and so on. Its very funny, but its not fooling about, It stays within the atmosphere of the play but gives the audience a breather so that Shakespeare, who absolutely did write this scene, can ratchet up the tension again.
Much of Macbeth deals with the supernatural, and the society for which it was initially written was, on the whole, much more superstitious than our own. Tell me about the supernatural elements in Elysium’s production. Can these aspects of the play still resonate with a twenty-first century audience?
Ostensibly we live in a hyper-rational, scientific age which doesn’t believe in things like witches and ghosts, but in reality we’ve never lost our fascination in the supernatural and the occult. The ubiquity of the Horror genre in film and TV, the novels of Stephen King, the Harry Potter franchise, all show that we’ve never stopped enjoying a good scare, or a story that bends the rules and overturns our rationalist consensus about the world. In the nineteenth century we had everything from Frankenstein to Dracula and Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, and before then ghost stories, myths and legends were always part of popular culture. Horror and the supernatural give us a release, they are a repository for our own irrational fears, and a means of catharsis for the more frightening recesses of our psyches. Shakespeare knew that, and knew that including supernatural elements in his plays, like swordfights and battles, was a great way of hooking an audience.
Do I think these aspects of the play will resonate with a twenty first-century audience? I do. We’re taking the Witches seriously, not playing them campy or for laughs (although they have their own wild humour), but trying to make them genuinely wild, terrifying and disturbing. These are women who live outside the norms of society, who reject its values, and revel in the dark freedom that gives them, but they are also blasted psychically through their connection with the darker world of their psyches and what Lady Macbeth calls ‘metaphysical aid’. Belief in the supernatural, the demonic, and even Christianity, are key elements of the play and key motivations for the characters. We have to take that seriously if we want to get the full emotional power of, whether we believe in it literally or not. As I’ve said in rehearsals, you don’t have to believe in Daleks to appear in Doctor Who or the Force to play a Jedi, but you do have to imagine them as a reality if you are going to make it work properly as a drama. So it goes with Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth is such a complex and fascinating character. How does she feature in your production? What is the dynamic between her and Macbeth?
Lady Macbeth is one of the standout creations of Shakespeare’s imagination and one of the single greatest tragic roles for an actress in the entire Western canon. Anyone who thinks Shakespeare was a misogynist or knew nothing about women needs to look at what he has written here and see the sheer depth and complexity with which he writes her. She is an extraordinarily passionate, dynamic, and strong-willed woman, a driving force in the first half of the play. Whole books could be written about her, but we are wanting to present her in as rich a way as possible. We see her demonic side, her manipulative side, her bullying side and of course her capacity for murder, but also her humanity – her intense love for Macbeth, the wound of losing her child, the struggle of being a passionate woman in a man’s world and, ultimately, her mental disintegration as she loses everything she lived for.
The Macbeths present the one detailed anatomy of a marriage in the whole of Shakespeare’s plays. Most couples are courting or pursuing each other – Romeo and Juliet, Rosalind and Orlando, Hamlet and Ophelia – or, if married, like the Capulets or Claudius and Gertrude, supporting rather than central characters. Even Othello and Desdemona are only newly married and come apart before they can truly get to know each other. Lord and Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, are right at the heart of the play. Exploring the titanic power of that relationship, its capacity for good being twisted and channelled into a capacity for evil, and then charting how it unravels until they are completely alienated from each other makes up the main meat of the drama and is exhilarating to explore.
Elysium Theatre Company are producing Macbeth in July 2023 as part of this summer’s Durham Shakespeare Festival, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Find out more about Elysium’s two productions or more about the whole festival, which also includes plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Mister Shakespeare.
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