The Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic starts its 2016-17 season with William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Jonathan Fox with sets and projections by Hana Sooyeon Kim, costumes by Dianne Graebner, lighting by Pablo Santiago, music by Randall Tico and starring Jamison Jones, Kathryn Meisle, Joseph Fuqua, Leslie Gangl Howe, A. K. Murtadha, Paul David Story, Rudolph Willrich, James Joseph O’Neil and Christine Sage.
After 400 years, Shakespeare’s plays still work on stage or screen — not all of them, or perhaps even most, but enough; maybe a dozen, though I’ve never sat down with my slide rule and worked it out. Of that dozen, give or take, Richard III and Macbeth are the best, then Hamlet with Othello and King Lear some way back. (Again, I’m talking about live theater!)
Of the comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night will always charm, but Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest continue to be performed chiefly to cater to the modern appetite for fantasy and special effects. (The Tempest is a great read, full of great, quotable lines, but Midsummer Night’s Dream, shorn of Felix Mendelssohn and the genius of Max Reinhardt, is dull and incomprehensible.) Romeo and Juliet is in a class by itself. (Andy Griffith and Flip Wilson once did a sketch of Andy telling Flip the story of Romeo and Juliet, in his inimitable laconic style, with Flip getting what laughs he could in his interruptions. At the end, it was if they both suddenly understood the bottomless sadness of it all. There was a pause. “It’s a jive story,” Flip said, accusingly. “Yeah,” Andy said, “I’m kind of sorry I got into it.” Yet Romeo and Juliet endures because of its quintessential romance, its poetry and for its capacity to evoke what Robert Craft called “that utopia of hopeless melancholy” common to “adolescents of all ages.”)
Richard III and Macbeth have survived every regime change, from the ascendency of the House of Stuart to the presidency of Barack Obama, because their stories of ruthless, murderous ambition with plots that tighten like a noose have never failed to fascinate each new generation of theatergoers. Both are based on historical personages: Richard III was King of England from 1483 to 1485, and his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field resolved the nearly 100-year War of the Roses between the Houses of York and Lancaster, in favor of the latter; Macbeth was King of Scotland from 1040 to 1057, when the son of the king he had murdered for the crown came back at the head of an army and killed him in armed combat.
When Shakespeare was writing Richard III, the ruler of England was the granddaughter of the man whom tradition has killing Richard at Bosworth Field, mano-a-mano. This is unlikely since Henry Tudor — something of a financial wizard who took power in a bankrupt state and died the richest monarch in Europe — was no great shakes as a warrior, and certainly not in the same league as Richard: a gifted military leader, a skilled swordsman and a kind of Bobby Kennedy attack dog for his family, the Plantagenets, York Division. Shakespeare, at any rate, had every incentive to heap negatives on Richard and to tell the story from the Tudor point of view. (Aye, there’s the rub! In making Richard, the mirror of smug, self-appreciating villainy, he made him immortal. Then, along came Laurence Olivier and made him irresistible.
By a neat coincidence, when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, the King of England was a Scot who might have traced, with the laborious pedantry for which he was famous, his descent all the way back to the son of Duncan, who avenged his father and became king by killing Macbeth. Yet, for all their superficial similarities, the two plays are very different. The term “Jacobean” (after King James I, 1603-1625) denotes a much darker artistic environment than the term “Elizabethan.” Hamlet (1601) takes the skull from the gravedigger, makes his “Alas! Poor Yorrick!” speech and hands it back. Vindice, the main character of Cyril Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1610), carries the skull of his murdered fiancée everywhere he goes:
My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally fill’d out
These ragged imperfections …
That play ends with a blood bath that might have lured a treatment by Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino.
Shakespeare’s vision had darkened as well. Gone was the nasty fun of Richard III (1592) (“I’m not in the giving vein today”); gone the fey, self-pitying laments of Richard II (1595):
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d …
This seems to recap the plots of his major plays, as yet unwritten. Macbeth (1606), famously, has moved beyond self-pity into pure nihilism:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
For all the grandeur of lines like this, and they are thick on the ground in Macbeth, I can think of no actor who made his name in the role. Gielgud and Olivier both gave it a miss. Orson Welles played him in his own 1948 film of the play, but though the film, for all its budgetary shortfalls, captures quite well the dark moodiness of the original, Welles as Macbeth is virtually indistinguishable from Welles as Othello, Welles as Gregory Arkadin or, for that matter, Welles as Charles Foster Kane: He was the greatest filmmaker America has yet produced, but as an actor he was too impressed with himself.
Maurice Evans managed to win an Emmy for his performance in the 1961 Hallmark Hall of Fame production but was seldom seen again, and never in so prominent a role. Jon Finch, who played the title role (and very well) in Roman Polanski’s stunning, brilliant film adaptation of Macbeth, went on in his next role to play the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, but nothing of comparable weight came his way after that. The various worthy actresses who have taken on the role of Lady Macbeth have similarly tended to disappear into the working play.
I know how superstitious actors are, and it is certainly not my intention to over-handicap Jones, the fine actor who will play Macbeth in the Ensemble production. I have no doubt that he will do very well. I mean only to suggest that with Macbeth, to a greater degree than any other of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, the play really is the thing, not the players. This quality, in fact, makes it ideal for the Ensemble.
This leaves the matter of why Macbeth remains popular and relevant. A thoughtful scholar, in his Introduction to a recent translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, said that each new generation will demand its own translation of Thucydides, which it then will read as a commentary on their own times. So it is with Macbeth. The spectacle of a tyrant seizing power, and the spectre of it, will always exert its fascination and will always provide a valid perspective on current events. As Dmitri Shostakovich is rumored to have said, when Joseph Stalin — or his toadies, in his name — took exception to his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mitsenk District, “A criminal ruler? Why should that interest Stalin?”
Macbeth runs Sept. 29 through Oct. 16 with shows at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday in the New Vic, 33 W. Victoria St. There also will be a matinee at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8 and a performance at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4. Tickets start at $35 and are available through the Ensemble box office at 805.965.5400 or online by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.