by Alex Storey

Created on: March 23, 2009   Last Updated: December 08, 2010

The Tragedy of Macbeth has had more written about than any other, because the theatre allows so much scope for interpretation. According to George Hunter it is short but not shortened!

The play in performance is a compact tragedy. Half the size of Hamlet it can be done in two hours flat in short, sharp, shocks. There have been three landmark performances in the last 30 odd years.

MACCA returns triumphantly from battle and encounters 3 witches on the heath who predict he will become Thane of Cawdor and then King of Scotland. Banquo is with him and will father kings.

Lady Macbeth spurs her husband on to kill King Duncan. Macbeth is then crowned and has Banquo killed, followed by Macduff's family. Lady Macbeth goes mad and dies.

Malcolm - Duncan's son - overthrows Macbeth with his army, camouflaged by leaves from Birnam Wood, fulfilling the second prophecy by the witches.

~ 1976 ~

Trevor Nunn famously put a black wooden O-ring on The Other Place stage floor in Stratford, symbolizing enclosed inner terror. Macduff stood outside the circle, while his family were slaughtered inside.

Nunn made Duncan white - the antithesis of Macbeth's blackness - preempting Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars just a year later, of course referring to good and evil using color!

Ian Mckellen and Judy Dench are now Sir and Dame almost purely off the back of their performances back then!

~ 1986 ~

Adrian Noble had the witches as children in a white nursery as real as anything at the Barbican, making the audience believe the supernatural actually existed the way people did in 1040 AD.

The play was set in a black box and the moving set allowed for stairs to jut out of the walls, doors to reappear, a table to rise up and smaller columns to jut out from the floor.

The walls finally moved in on the killer, shrinking his world around him. The net closes and Macbeth is killed by Malcolm who is then crowned King of Scotland.

~ 1999 ~

Gregory Doran had rubbery stage walls at the Swan in Stratford where apparitions leered out. The theatre was a labyrinth of aisles, gangways, stairs and galleries.

It became an assault course for a play set in a modern, militaristic society in which Macbeth was a superb fighting-machine in beret and battle fatigues. This is supposed to allude to war torn Yugoslavia with the Milosovics as the Macbeths.

Doran also tracked the psychology of a doomed marriage, which descended, into madness, guilt, anxiety, depression and paranoia ultimately resulting in the downfall of the Macbeths!

SOUNDS

"I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?" Act II, Scene II.

Irving Wardle the drama critic said Macbeth was the best play ever for radio, because the protagonist is immediately introduced engaging the listener straight away in the first short scene of just 10 lines.

Soliloquy easily lends itself to non-visual conditions and Macbeth himself delivers "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow", one of Shakespeare's most famous. The play traditionally relies on the audience own imagination, even on stage!

It is a play of noises and noises appall Macbeth. Shrieking owls, screaming women and laughter. Cheek by Jowl, in 1987 had extras drumming fingers on the theatre floorboards and a bow scraped on a violin in the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden.

This is just some of the scope for interpretation the superstitious "Scottish Play" has had.

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