Macbeth: The man who would be king
“Macbeth was written as a thriller in its own day,” says the show’s director, Keith Thompson. “So, while it is a tragedy, there is also a lot of fun to it. The play runs along at this incredible pace. It’s like a steam train that doesn’t let up. We’re making it an hour-and-a-half long, with no interval. We’ve cut certain things, where necessary, but nothing major.”
Macbeth is the story of a Scottish army general who — having been told by three witches that the throne will come to him — connives with his wife, the ambitious Lady Macbeth, to seize the crown by murdering the reigning King Duncan and framing someone else. When the deed is done, it triggers further brutality, and the guilt haunts both the new king and his wife.
Thompson says the new production does not draw heavy parallels with modern state politics or contemporary mores, an approach to Shakespeare that has become rampant.
“We’re not trying to make it resonant with modern Ireland,” he says. “We’re not making Macbeth a banker, and his wife a greedy housewife who wants more money, or something. I think that the story and the characters in Macbeth are archetypal. And the story is something we understand very well in modern Ireland. It’s about greed, and then it’s about guilt.”
“For me, Macbeth’s tragedy is not that he wanted to be king. That’s a perfectly legitimate ambition for a man in his position. It’s that he wants it so much that he can’t wait. In the third scene, he says: ‘If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.’ So he realises he doesn’t have to do anything. He can just wait and it may happen. But then he meets up with the wife and the idea quickly begins to gnaw at him, and, later that night, he kills the king. We really want to get across this sense of greed that just takes over, and how, after the act, the two of them are dealing with the guilt of it. A lot of productions will present Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth, as going mad, but, in some ways, I think that actually reduces their responsibility. They do the crime and then they have to deal with it. I don’t think they go mad. They have to deal with their guilt.”
The cast create the sound and music during the show. “With everything in the production, we’ve been asking ourselves how they would originally have done it, back in 1611,” Thompson says. “So the actors will have musical instruments and they’ll be creating a soundscape. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth keep saying the word ‘done’ and they repeatedly say ‘what’s done is done’. And that has this finality about it, this really heavy beat. So we’re going to use a lot of percussion to get across a sense of rhythm and finality.”
The venue should add texture. Smock Alley is Ireland’s oldest theatre, dating back to the 1660s, just 60 years after Macbeth was written. Thompson says they’re turning the boys’ school space within the building into an “Elizabethan playhouse”.
“The boys’ school area is perfect, because we can turn it into a ‘thrust space’, so that there are audience members on three sides. It’s very tall, with balconies, so we have the actors up there at certain points, even amongst the audience. There’s a very immersive vibe to it.”
Given the long-held superstition in theatre that Macbeth carries a curse, it’s worth noting that Smock Alley was rebuilt twice in the 1700s, following collapses within the structure.
“I didn’t know that,” says Thompson. “Don’t tell me that, now when the show’s about to go on.”
To avoid the curse, the play’s title is not to be mentioned by name, so theatre people, instead, refer to it as ‘the Scottish play’. Have Thompson and the crew been going balls-out and calling it Macbeth in rehearsals?
“Ah, yeah,” he says. “Most of the actors, these days, wouldn’t pay any heed to that at all. But just to make sure nobody’s worried, you say Macbeth ad nauseam on the first day of rehearsals, until everyone decides that nothing bad is going to happen. Throughout the process, we have had a few things, but there are always hiccups when you stage a play.
“It took us a while to get a venue sorted, for instance, but that can happen whatever you are doing, whether it’s Hamlet or The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
Thompson co-founded Fast Intent a couple of years ago, with three of his cohorts from UCD’s student theatre, and they have gained a foothold in a busy Irish theatre scene.
Their staging of Macbeth follows productions of Jean Anouilh’s Joan of Arc and Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes.
“As a company, our main focus is on text, on words and language,” says Thompson. “For all of us, it’s important to keep producing theatre.
“Times are tough, especially with cuts in arts funding across the board, but we want to keep creating opportunities for actors and designers.”
* Macbeth runs at Smock Alley from Jan 13 to Jan 25
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