The Scottish Play

recently helped Lisa prepare for some lessons at her school by writing a short essay comparing and contrasting the language in Macbeth's "Is this a dagger..." soliloquy with his monologue starting "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...".

I enjoyed writing the essay. For a time, Macbeth was my favourite Shakespearean play, and over the years I've seen many productions. Some have been mundane, but some have been highly imaginative and effective.

One low budget production in a small, hot room in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival kept the witches on stage throughout the performance, implying their pervasive influence over the story. Even when they had no lines, the witches would take part, for example by tying ropes round Macbeth's wrists and pulling him in different directions as he struggled with decisions.

A production in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with a slightly bigger budget, started with trees on stage. There was no curtain in the theatre, so the house lights went off completely before the actors came on. In complete darkness, there was a sudden, bright flash and a loud bang, then the stage lights came up. All of the foliage had disappeared from the trees, and the 'blasted heath' was a World War 1 battlefield of tree stumps and mud.

Less successful productions have included a performance entirely in Polish, again in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which ended with Macbeth dressing himself in a huge suit of Japanese armour then standing motionless. Few, if any, of the audience, could understand Polish, so it was a while before we realised that the final confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff had been cut.

I've seen two poor productions of Macbeth at the New Vic theatre in Staffordshire. One had a futuristic setting, where Macbeth's castle was made from scaffolding, and the porter and Macduff used video phones and television screens to communicate when the latter knocked at the castle door.

The other was much worse - Lady Macbeth was a vamp. She had apparently borrowed her dress from Miss Scarlet, and she shrieked her lines from the start, so there was nowhere for her to go when things started to get tense. In contrast, the witches, who are surely some of the most melodramatic creations in fiction, stood motionless and intoned their lines with no feeling. We walked out of that one.

Tags: Macbeth | Shakespeare | theatre | good | bad | imaginitive | production